


2020, 2021

by newleaves



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 2000-2020 as the story of Harry and Ginny’s marriage, Auror Harry Potter, Draco’s magical iPhone, Ginny and Neville’s beautiful love, Harry Potter Epilogue Compliant, Harry and Draco trying their best given how they are both dedicated to extremely demanding jobs, Harry’s odd thoughts about sleeping with Ron and/or Hermione, Harry’s scar from an IED that takes the shape of the Brecon Beacons, M/M, Not Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Compliant, Pokemon References, Teddy Lupin the radical champagne socialist, The Potterpins WhatsApp Group, Unspeakable Draco Malfoy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:34:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 64,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26158882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newleaves/pseuds/newleaves
Summary: Harry’s going through a divorce.  It’s a love story, really.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter, Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley, Neville Longbottom/Ginny Weasley
Comments: 83
Kudos: 160





	1. August, September

**Author's Note:**

> This is a somewhat bittersweet, contemporary fic about escapism, I suppose - I hope you enjoy it! It was written in the summer of 2020 and has ended up an AU from the start of 2021. Whether by chance or because the wizards have intervened somehow, Harry's UK never enters Lockdown 3.
> 
> The stakes all sit within the realm of psychology/relationships/society, but I should say that Harry is pretty messed up by an encounter ten years ago with what was a curse-magic bomb hidden in a cardboard box. Draco has done a few dodgy things in his time relating to Harry; he’s up front about what’s new, regrets it and Harry’s all right with it.
> 
> On Harry’s Ron and/or Hermione thoughts, I’m not an OT3 shipper at all, but for some reason the incestuousness of the HP universe makes it amusing to me to have Harry panic that he might be interested in his friends sexually. Draco’s the only one who talks about it explicitly, and he’s a spy of ambiguous morality in this story.

The heat of August is historically significant, they say. The longest period of sustained high heat in London since 1961, when Harry’s parents were babies. They would be sixty years old now, and Harry expects that they would still be together.

When Harry thinks of his marriage ending, in the future, he knows that he’ll think of this heat. He’ll think of the rainstorms which follow. Violence in America, though that’s always difficult to date. He’ll think of James Sirius receiving his OWLs, the culmination of his early years at Hogwarts and three months of Ginny teaching him at home in number 12, Grimmauld Place.

There was no quidditch being played during lockdown, Harry will remember, which was hard for everyone in their house. Ginny’s Magpies were bored and Ginny was bored with them, looking up exercises for her players to do in their gardens while cajoling them about diet, because they had nothing else to spend their money on, without parties, without brooms, without life outside. The children thought that Ginny’s teaching was boring, and said so – too much cajoling about essay style and no animals running wild in the classroom – but they enjoyed the mandated daily exercise, which Ginny made sure to tell the school.

Harry was still going into the Ministry, which reminded him of Diagon Alley in the final years of the war. Reported crime was down, at least, so he had time to take on Albus and Lily’s teaching preparation in the evenings, the early mornings; read their essays; work through wand movements and sous chef for James while he practised for Potions. It was the most time he’d spent with the children in years. He enjoyed it; they didn’t seem to know what to make of him.

In August, when James’s OWL results come in, Ginny finds them frustrating. They’re a calculation, in the end, based on his marks from the first to fourth years of Hogwarts. Unlike the muggles, the Ministry makes clear in a shirty little note, the students of Hogwarts will be keeping what they’ve been given.

“They could have kept the school open, really,” Ginny suggests when the letters have been read – when James and Albus have gone out and Lily has retreated to her room. “Dumbledore kept it open for the basilisk,” she jokes. She does an impression, frowning, “ _While I am headmaster…_ ”

It makes Harry laugh, and they look at each other.

Because it’s funny. Ginny’s frustrated because James is like her: competitive. His test marks from first to fourth were all As and Es, because there was no immediate reward. For OWLs he was aiming for Os, and he and Ginny were playing a game they wanted to win. The Ministry had promised replacement exams.

“The basilisk was nearly thirty years ago,” Harry reminds his wife. She makes a face.

James’s results are a lot like Harry’s, after everything, when they come through. Just without any fails. It registers oddly, how unimpressed his son is by the mixture of letters.

But Harry doesn’t dwell on James’s results. None of the family dwells on much. By the middle of August, not long after this, the children find out that their parents’ marriage is ending; that it’s been ending for months, maybe years. There likely would have been a better time to tell them, but Harry and Ginny have been putting it off, until the historically significant period of heat means that they can’t bear to sleep in the same bed, not for one more night.

“This is impossible, Harry,” says Ginny, wearing nothing, her shape visible in the dark. She’s been saying that Harry should be sleeping naked too. He’s nothing but a furnace, next to her in bed. She doesn’t get dressed to go down the hall; she’s been embarrassing the children for years.

In the morning, the children (Albus) complain about their naked mother roaming the house instead of using the en suite, and it all comes out on Ginny’s thirty-ninth birthday, the eleventh. She doesn’t sleep in Harry’s bedroom again.

“Your dad and I still love each other very much, and we love you,” Ginny tells their children, who are devastated, in shock. Albus pretends not to cry. James lets Lily cry for him.

But Ginny keeps explaining. She’s always been more articulate than Harry. _We don’t belong to each other anymore,_ she said the night when Harry realised she agreed it was over, some inauspicious night in May.

Harry belongs to his job, he has a feeling. He doesn’t want to, but it is what it is.

There were no plans to celebrate Ginny’s birthday, so nothing is ruined, really, in August. It’s much like Harry’s fortieth, for which he didn’t have a party. The children gave him an old man’s tweed cap as a joke. They’ve given Ginny earrings with dangling clusters of semi-precious quidditch balls, which she loves and is already wearing when she and Harry tell them the news. The earrings will have been Lily’s choice, Harry thinks as Ginny explains, tiny golden snitches each twinkling on its chain against bludgers and the quaffle, the three of which might be made out of jasper. Lily likely chose Harry’s hat too, because she’s getting good at things like this, going into second year this year – Albus is going into fourth; James sixth.

The three of them are so bright, Harry was reminded during lockdown. And it matters, maybe, that Harry enjoyed preparing and marking schoolwork for Lily, Albus and James far more than he enjoys the administrative parts of his job. He enjoyed the practical parts of teaching them more than anything he does as an auror.

That’s the difference between playing as an amateur and working as a senior professional, he told himself at the time.

Lying in bed, in the heat, in the rainy cool, in the wind of the final days of August, on his own for the first time in years since Ginny was regularly on tour – Harry finds himself thinking about his job. He wonders what it would be like to move sideways off the promotion track and into training. Trainee aurors learn as apprentices, the trade passed on like every other wizarding profession, and Harry’s had several apprentices now. These days, nonetheless, unlike when Harry learned from Kingsley, there’s also a central programme director, who’s currently a witch in her sixties named Cordelia Rosewater. Harry wonders if the next one could be him.

He won’t leave the promotion track, he’s almost certain. There’s too much to do, and he’s too far into the maze to give up on finding the centre of the Ministry. But the world has changed in the past twenty years; the Auror Office has changed with it. Harry’s changed with it, and he’s not who he used to be. He regrets that, sometimes.

The day when August turns into September, Harry and Ginny take their children to Platform 9¾ to see them off together one last time. All three kids are in dark, angry moods, rather than just Albus, for once. Ginny chats to several Gryffindor and Slytherin parents; Harry chats mostly to Ron, who will have told Rose and Hugo this morning. The kids asked for that, though they’re not as close to Ron and Hermione’s children as Harry always imagined that they would be.

On the platform, James prefers to find Percy’s daughters, the cousins he’s closest to, while Lily has her own little friends, not related at all. Albus heads off to find Scorpius and say hello to his idol, Mr Malfoy, who will have been told about Harry’s divorce by his son. He looks up without Mrs Malfoy by his side, and Harry’s surprised to find that the expression on his face is sympathetic; they share a nod, and Malfoy shares a nod with Ginny too.

This is the only interaction Harry thinks they’ve had since the start of last year, because he had to miss the first Slytherin quidditch match of 2019, 2020. It’s the only interaction they’ll have until the first Slytherin quidditch match of this year – which is 2020, 2021.

Once the train has left, Harry and Ginny leave the platform, and after hugging Ron for a squeeze Ginny apparates home, one last time, to pick up her own trunk and depart.

Harry walks. He tries to dawdle, but the journey still only takes twenty minutes, one single mile. He’s left Ron with the Gryffindor dads for the traditional post-Express pub trip, claiming to the others that he was off to join the Slytherins, who should assume that he's stuck with Ron. It’s normal for Harry to split his time between the two groups of dads, who never drink together, no matter how pathetic that is; he wonders whether Malfoy will give the game away.

Arriving at number 12, Grimmauld Place, Harry finds his own bag half-packed where he left it, never capable of running on time. He finishes and tells Kreacher that Teddy will be along in the afternoon, and that he’ll be looking after the house for a while, because he’s out of work and needs a job, at twenty-two. Ron and Hermione have said that Harry can stay with them for a bit.

The floo powder is gritty in his hand as he throws it to the fire and pushes the bag through. The empty feeling of the house is getting to him, the way it does every year, and it’s emptier this time.

On the other side of the fire, Hermione’s already crying, up from the sofa to greet him.

“Well, that’s it,” Harry tells her, to say it. “I’m officially one half of a lockdown divorce.”

“Oh Harry,” says Hermione, sniffing brightly, still short but quite large and cuddly these days, after the children. Still black enough to count, as she puts it, though she was raised so very white. “Oh Harry; I don’t know what to say.”

Harry shrugs as the tears grow and crack in his eyes, as Hermione breaks the social distance they’ve been just about maintaining and holds him to her like Molly Weasley always would, like she's holding a bag of bones. He’s never put on much weight; he’s nothing but muscle and vinegar, Ginny’s long said. “It is what it is,” he tells Hermione. “That’s it, isn’t it? That’s all it is.”

They’re both useless by the time Ron comes home.

“Right, come on,” he says, rescuing Harry and Hermione from the sodden lumps they’ve become on the sofa. He’s not exactly portly, these days, Ron, though Harry notices the paunch. His hair’s going thin. He’s starting to look a bit like Arthur did, when they were all Lily’s age. “We need some fresh air. There must be a pizza in the freezer – Harry, here, you open that wine.”

Harry’s in love with his friends, he sometimes thinks in a panic. It’s something Ginny used to say as a joke, but sometimes Harry’s sure it must be true.

They trudge outside into the Granger-Weasley garden when Ron comes home – and the air is fresher, the weather OK.

* * *

After pizza, when they’re all much less sober – Ron got started with the Gryffindor dads – they find themselves on the obvious topic.

It’s barely one o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon, but the first of September is always a holiday, wherever it falls in the week, and they’re sitting outside in Ron and Hermione’s demure, mostly paved garden. Ron’s half-arsed patch for pumpkins is almost bearing fruit.

This is how he’ll remember this summer, Harry thinks, shivering to feel the chill of autumn. More than the heat, he’ll remember the first time he was allowed to visit his Ron and Hermione and sit within the boundary of their house. How much it felt like breathing, to be near them again and not with his wife. How much it felt like coming home from work.

“You promised,” Ron’s insisting, pedantic when he’s drunk. “You were going to tell us what happened when it was over, one way or another.”

“We were hoping for the other,” Hermione chips in, crunching at a leftover, slightly burnt crust of pizza.

The pizza was good, though Harry’s already forgotten what was on it. It’s so easy to find good muggle food nowadays. The same is true of muggle wine, and there’s a fresh bottle on the table. Harry opens it and he’s pouring. “Does it matter?” he tries to hedge, feeling worn out from crying, annoyed with the panic and blankness in his head.

“Of course it matters, Harry,” says Hermione, too kind. She finishes the last gulp from her glass, swallowing as though her heart is broken, letting him refill the empty. “But you don’t have to –”

“No, no, you need to get it out,” Ron insists, pedantic, chinking Harry’s glass with his own inappropriately. “You’ve at least three months’ purging ahead of you, I reckon,” he says like a dad. “You rant and rave and froth, mate,” he instructs him. “We’re here.”

“Oh Ron,” says Hermione, already crying again, in love with the man she plans to die with. Maybe Harry’s in love with that.

“It is what it is,” Harry tells them, not sure what to say. “She opened a door in a head; I opened one in mine. We couldn’t shut them again.”

“You need to give us a bit more than that,” Ron informs him, sitting back, drinking and working a hand at his stomach like an arse. It might be acid reflux; he won’t get it checked.

“It was stupid,” Harry tries to explain, looking down into his glass. He couldn’t sleep during lockdown; he had too much energy. Barely anything was happening at work, and yet Harry knew that things would be happening behind closed doors. “I was having terrible nightmares; it made everything seem…”

“Did it get bad?” Hermione asks sympathetically, hinting.

“Not that bad,” Harry dismisses, turning to Ron, away from this thought. “I’d wake her up. And Ginny was good about it – of course she was…”

“But you don’t like to wake people up,” Ron finishes the sentence, understanding.

Harry nods, appreciative. “We’d get stuck, trying to talk to each other,” Harry tells Hermione, rather drunk, he feels with a turn. “I could tell that Gin was worried about…” He drinks wine, shaking his head. “But she wouldn’t _tell me_. We found this muggle counsellor online and it was all inconsequential rubbish, you know, but then she said it…”

He drifts off for a moment. 

“Said what?” Ron demands, and Harry jumps to remember that he and Hermione are here. He’s in their garden, where it’s cloudy and windy but so warm, somewhere in his chest.

“She’s been emotionally unfaithful to me,” Harry reports, and the words leave him feeling empty.

For a moment, no one says anything.

“She didn’t mean to,” Harry carries on shortly, with another swallow of wine. “She got carried away. But it opened a door in her head she couldn’t shut.”

Now, Harry knows the end of this story, so he knows that Ginny was talking about a period of around three months, a year ago, when Lily had just started her first year at Hogwarts and Harry was working on a case which involved taking an Unbreakable Vow.

It hit Ginny harder than anyone would have expected, her youngest child going to Hogwarts, and her husband was only coming home to sleep. She was embarrassed; she didn’t do being maternal, so she didn’t understand…

Harry barely remembers these months, he was so stressed. He missed so many social events. It wasn’t exciting information, most of what he had to keep secret: details of a few suspected cells and magically souped-up ransomware. Numbers he found himself seeing in his sleep. He learned a lot about the dark web, which was the most interesting part – though it made him worry about the horrific, scarring things his tiny James might see while tinkering around. Or Albus, whose quidditch game he missed.

It’s fifteen years that Harry’s been working in counter-terrorism for the aurors, but this case taught him so much about the maze of the Ministry that he hadn’t known before. He didn’t recognise the institution he was working for, at times. Gradually he’s come to wonder how he was ever so naïve.

It was a difficult period. It coincided with Luna’s magizoological fellowship in California, which was cut short in March. This is only relevant inasmuch as it meant that for the fellowship’s first three months, from September to the new year, Ginny wasn’t meeting up with Neville and Luna as a trio when she went up to Hogsmeade; she was meeting up with Neville on his own.

 _Dear old Neville,_ Harry still thinks, imagining him teaching the kids about magical plants. He must have been so kind.

And maybe it was coincidence, Harry thinks. The case with the Unbreakable Vow and Luna’s fellowship and the pandemic to cap these things off. Maybe it’s only the combination which made Harry’s marriage collapse. The fact that they were locked up in the box which had killed Harry’s godfather with James now the age that Harry had been, a little creature made of sticks, too much like an adult and much, much too much like a child. Ginny hadn’t spent so much time on the ground since school, when she was locked up in a castle where they wanted her dead, and Lily was the age when Ginny’s childhood had been stolen away from her.

Albus was Albus, and they would never stop worrying about him, cut off from his family in Slytherin House.

The Ministry was a cold place with only a skeleton staff, and Harry was seeing its shadows. Ginny’s team were depressed more than bored, in reality, though she tried not to let them dwell. Neville was seconded from Hogwarts with the Potions Master while St Mungo’s worked on a wizarding cure, and Ginny was heartbreakingly worried about him – because he got it, of course, before he recovered – and that’s why it all came out.

Ginny used to say that Harry was in love with his friends. Turns out, she was projecting – because it’s a love story, really, the story of Harry’s divorce. It just isn’t his.

At least not yet.

For Harry, at the start of September, it’s a tragedy. He thinks that this is why he finds Ron and Hermione’s first reactions so funny.

For Ron’s part, he breathes in, looking incensed but also impotent – and it takes him a moment until he looks around the garden, at his pumpkin patch. “Mate,” he says with a sigh, in the end, scratching at the thin patch of hair on his head, and Harry can’t imagine a day when he doesn’t love him. “I have no idea what that means, _emotionally unfaithful_. Are you saying that she slept with someone else?”

“No –” Harry says. He’s not sure how to explain. He’s never had to. They didn’t tell the kids. “It’s not like that. It’s more…” He gestures. “It’s ambiguous. It’s like – she indulged in sexual tension with someone else. She opened a door,” he says a third time, because that’s what the counsellor called it and Harry imagines it that way, in his head.

“ _Indulged in sexual tension?_ ” Ron’s repeating, pulling a face, sounding incredulous. And it really does make Harry laugh. “Fuck me, I mean…” He shrugs, waving his hands, laughing, “What the fuck is that?” He’d never be this callous sober.

And Hermione’s being quiet, Harry thinks – so he looks at her.

She’s framed by the house, modest and secure and only a short walk from the Northern line – not that it matters when number 12’s an even more convenient route into Zone 1. She’s frowning, uncertain, her glass of wine set at her mouth.

“Oh Harry, I’m sorry,” she says, putting down her glass when Harry catches her eye. She’s tearing up again, and it’s only shock and panic, presumably, but Harry thinks that he could kiss her, she looks so very much like she needs it. There’s a tickle of wild laughter in his chest. “Oh Harry; I think that she must have meant me.”

This comes out of nowhere. “What?” Harry asks, the sound huffing out of him.

“ _What?!_ ” Ron echoes more loudly, jerking forward and sloshing his wine.

“Oh Harry,” Hermione repeats, sniffing and wiping at her eyes, so _guilty._ “Oh, it was stupid. It was January,” she says, as though anyone remembers what was happening in _January_. “It was my turn to host the Gryffindor mums. Ginny stayed late and we were finishing the cocktails…”

“ _What?!_ ” Ron repeats.

And Harry’s tittering wildly, because his wife wasn’t talking about Hermione and the Gryffindor mums. She was talking about Neville and the habit she got into of seeing him four times a week. They found themselves having weirder and weirder conversations in Hogsmeade, and they realised it was wrong when they ended up on what James and Albus and Lily would have been called, if Neville had been their dad.

Ginny cried when she reported this, so Harry knows that she feels guilt. She has so much love for their children. He can’t understand what she was thinking at the time, and this is why they’re getting divorced.

The idea of Ginny and Hermione –

“She was so certain that Lily had been acting differently; you’re both awful sexists and won’t want to know, but _girl things_ had happened and Ginny hadn’t been there –”

Hermione’s still compulsively explaining, tearful.

“I don’t remember what we were talking about, but the air changed,” Hermione confesses, here where all three of them are incongruously drunk in the early afternoon, turned forty in the past year, another decade closer to mortality. “I was touching her hand and saying, _It’s OK_ , you know? –”

“ _What?!_ ” Ron demands a third time, loud enough for the birds to react. A gust of wind follows him up. He’s laughing now too, though, and this why Ron and Hermione have never fallen apart.

“Oh, stop it!” Hermione spits at him, distracted, her tone laced with guilt. “You’re always so dismissive of my bisexuality.” Her tone is also camp and arch, because she doesn’t actually feel resentment over this.

“I don’t know what you want me to say!” Ron immediately reacts, distracted, callously drunk, looking aggrieved. “You won’t tell me who’s your type,” he begins, winding up to a rant, and yet never without an edge of good humour. “Clearly that’s because you fancy my sister…”

“I do not fancy your sister; I’m only saying that the air changed –”

They start arguing, inevitably. Harry would like to say that he’s a stranger to such intimacy between his best friends, but he’s known them very nearly thirty years. Fuck if he doesn’t crave this feeling of closeness. Besides, it’s not exclusive to him – the Granger-Weasleys argue in public. They’ve always been the ones suspected of trouble. Harry has to explain that this is just what they’re like.

“Neither of wants –” Ron’s gesturing vaguely, talking loudly, and Harry thinks that he means a threesome. Harry likes to think that they’d ask him first. He’d say no, he reminds himself, drinking another swallow of wine. “And you don’t think that us consuming lesbo porn would count as a ho –”

“Pornography is not about sex, Ron!” Harry hears both in his head and out loud.

“Well, you’re not about to watch it on your own, so what am I supposed to be acknowledging?” Ron demands, before the huff of a grin breaks his expression into a joke.

Hermione won’t let Ron watch porn either. He might not find it so funny, Harry supposes, if he’d seen the sort of stuff that’s become readily accessible in the past twenty years. Harry saw some on James’s phone over the summer – lying around behind an open door, autoplaying after the webpage finally loaded on number 12’s dodgy WiFi while James was getting a pumpkin juice, of all things.

He flipped his lid, it disturbed him so deeply. James insisted that it wasn’t what he clicked, though he wouldn’t say what it was that he had.

“You’re supposed to acknowledge that I’d want to be with you no matter who you’d been born,” Hermione’s hammering out in the garden, leaning over her chair towards Ron –

And that’s sexual tension, Harry observes in his head. The Gryffindor mums and dads are so innocent, until they figure it out. His friends are a pair of emotional exhibitionists. He’s an emotional voyeur, most likely.

With a snort, Harry looks away to the overgrown whatever-it-is climbing up the garden wall’s trellis. Neville would know. It’s a romantic sentiment, Hermione’s, though judging by Ron’s continuing laughter, he’s confused. Harry’s not feeling like romance today. “I’m pretty sure that’s pansexuality,” he interrupts, because he’s been reading one of Teddy’s books. Teddy’s gained a muggle girlfriend over the summer, who studied Sociology. “Are you sure that’s not you instead?”

Hermione jumps at his voice, flushing and embarrassed, raking her ever bushy hair away from her flushed face. It’s impossible to believe, but she may actually have forgotten Harry’s here. He’s never known how to cope with realising that she or Ron have turned each other on.

It’s a good thing that the kids are off to school, Harry thinks. They’re so fucking drunk. “I mean,” he says, telling them, “ _I’m_ bisexual.” He gestures to the side of his ear. “Ginny’s this female archetype in my head, and I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep with a woman again.”

It would feel wrong, Harry’s sure. Like a betrayal, he suspects. Of his and Ginny’s children, if not Ginny herself. Or maybe he’s saying something else.

They’re both looking at him, Ron and Hermione. Ron’s swallowing awkwardly, squinting, because he’s as bad as Hermione, at hiding it.

Harry knocks back the end of this next glass of wine and reaches for the bottle. His feelings about other women’s bodies is why he’s sure that he’ll never understand Ginny’s thing with Neville. But the thing is, he’s not guiltless, and this is what he’s been putting off explaining.

“I’ve been thinking, since March,” he tells his best friends as he pours, and he doesn’t know what this story is. “I don’t want to die again without trying the other way.” He opened a door in his head. “I’ve never really kissed anyone besides Ginny, you know. Never gone further.” He can get in such a panic about it. It’s like what they say being a teenager’s like. “The husband of a wife; the dad in a sitcom… That’s not all I am; I don’t…”

It takes a moment, for this to sink in. For his best friends to realise what he’s done.

It was everything he wanted, once upon a time, to fit into a beautiful picture. For several years he did. Ginny never had these obsessions.

Harry wonders if Ron and Hermione will make it easy – more difficult – and tell him that he could have come to them months ago, just for one night, to get away before he went back.

But Hermione, bless her – she sniffs as though Harry’s said something profound, meaningful, significant enough to cause Harry to do what he’s done, no matter that it’s horrendously selfish. Horrendously sad. Horrendously cliché, though hopefully not for the kids’ generation. She leans around the table and rubs Harry roughly on the knee.

It makes him jump, but it’s really that he doesn’t know what he’s doing now, wifeless. He discovered his sex drive around the age that Teddy is now, so much later than James. He was already married. Ginny was surprised.

“Oh, mate, you’ve always been like this,” says Ron abruptly, and it makes Harry jump.

The expression on his face is wry, accepting, pulling into a smirk. Harry’s attracted to men, is the thing. He could be attracted to Ron, if he wanted to. He doesn’t know why he never realised, before he was locked up in his house.

“What a fucking mess, you fucking idiot,” Ron’s saying. He tilts back in his chair and kicks Harry with the flat of his cold socked foot, which makes Harry laugh. “It’s not funny!” he insists, but Hermione’s tittering too. “I bet you’ve no plan at all,” he says, scratching his long nose and then gesturing. “I had a whole list of rebounds lined up.”

“Oh, no you did not,” Hermione scoffs, catching Harry’s attention and rolling her eyes, sharing this joke. “Don’t exaggerate –”

“I did!” Ron insists, promising Harry, and they’re not quite at it again. “Agatha in Eeylops is gagging to comfort you.”

Squeezing his nose, Harry feels like he could explode, here in this perfect paved garden. “Well, I’m off witches, Ron,” he allows himself to say, nudging his glasses up his nose. He accepts it. He glances down, because they’ve all produced children. “You can find me a cock.” 

At the word and at the look, inevitably, Ron turns bright red.

“Oh _Harry_ ,” says Hermione, leaning over the table and gossiping the way she must do with the Gryffindor mums. Her expression is wicked, glancing at Ron, though her eyes are still a little sad. “What an adventure. Are you excited?” She seems to think that there’s no threat to Ron from Harry at all.

As for Harry, he swallows, imagining it, still panicking. He needs to escape, he knows, from all of his thoughts. “I’m think so,” he says, and he commits himself to walking through a door.


	2. September, October

If Harry’d ever imagined that he’d want to pick up a man – to pick up someone other than his wife – he thinks that he would have paid more attention to how these things work. As it is, he can barely remember how he picked up Ginny, only that he smacked their mouths together when he was a few months older than baby James is now, broke up with her a month later, maybe two, enjoyed his first deep snog on his birthday, and then by the end of NEWTs in 1999 they were spending time by the lake on their own again. It was Ginny who’d pull his hand up her robes. He was certain that he would love her forever.

He spends September at Ron and Hermione’s, mostly, allowing himself to rave and froth and embarrass himself, his rants often sad and sometimes bitter. He’s hiding in their company; Hermione turns forty-one. Work’s a distraction, until the news comes out and makes him froth again, not least when Percy Weasley, of all people, insists that he take a sabbatical.

“I don’t need a sabbatical!” Harry tells Percy, summoned to the fiefdom of his office. Inevitably, the Ministry’s HR-PR department has been known as Herpes since its inception at some point in the early 2000s.

“You’re taking a sabbatical, Harry,” Percy tells him, tapping a finger to his desk, a sarcastic git and really one of Harry’s good friends. For him, the Ministry has only ever worked one way. “It says so on this form.”

So many times, Harry’s booked leave and had something fall through. It doesn’t happen this time.

Eventually, on sabbatical, Harry’s urge to rant fizzles out, and the first person he asks for advice is his godson, in October. He only realises that he’s doing it when it’s done.

“Dad,” Teddy’s asking him through the floo one Friday morning, impatient, blue-haired and twenty-two, his eyebrow pierced. He’s radical, politically, having come out of Hufflepuff – because they’re all radical in Hufflepuff nowadays; who knew? “Dad, I don’t mean to sound ungrateful…” His eyes are bright amber and they clash like sunshine with his sky-turquoise hair. “But are you ever coming home?”

 _I am home,_ Harry wants to tell him.

Teddy looks so much like Tonks and Remus Lupin’s child now he’s grown up, tall like them both with his mum’s style and his dad’s quirky sangfroid – but he’s been calling Harry Dad since James started calling him Dada. He’s never called Ginny Mum, which was never a problem, as far as Harry knows. It might mean that he was cheating on her all along, in a way, with Fleur Weasley, whom Teddy calls Mum sometimes. He never used to want to in front of Victoire – because Victoire is most definitely not his sister, even if he now insists that she’s a stuck-up princess, after the cataclysm of their break-up.

It was all fluid, once, in Teddy’s tiny head, and Harry knows how that feels. The lines have settled, the older he’s become. He’s been edging out his grandmother since he left school, because stately, pureblood Andromeda has never quite fit, and Harry doesn’t know how to fix it. He tried to mediate between them after lockdown: she thought Teddy reckless for going on the BLM march; Teddy called her racist for trying to stop him. Mediation didn’t work; Andromeda cried and Teddy went on the next protest too.

He wears an anarchy ring on his right hand, Teddy, which he found years ago in his dad’s stuff. Harry can’t imagine that Remus ever wore it, but he wonders whether he should try out something similar, instead of the gold band which he’s not yet removed.

“You getting sick of Kreacher’s love and attention?” Harry jokingly accuses, instead of talking to Teddy about any of this.

“Petra’s at her mum’s,” Teddy complains through the floo from number 12. Petra’s the girlfriend, Harry remembers. She went to a very nice school; she’s very left wing; Teddy has a type. “I’m not ready to tell her that my dad owns a mansion.”

“What’s the plan?” Harry mocks him, always amused by the great shame Teddy feels, to have grown up with money. “Get a bedsit and entertain her in style?”

Teddy’s found a job now, at least. He crossed his first line in the sand and started applying to design jobs in the wizarding world. He was immediately snapped up as Harry Potter’s godson, and it almost certainly feels bittersweet.

“I can’t afford a fucking bedsit,” Teddy tells Harry, angry. “Astrid on the Pufflehuff chat says that there’s a room with them in Hackney. I can get the bus from there.”

“Or you could apparate,” Harry suggests.

“Or I could apparate,” agrees Teddy, not even joking. “Like an elitist, mugglephobic twat.”

Harry sighs.

Teddy’s eyes glint in preparation for the argument. Ginny’s always said that they’re exactly alike.

“How is it that you met Petra, anyway?” Harry asks to change the subject more than anything, kneeling in front of the fire. “And come through,” he insists, waving Teddy into Ron and Hermione’s deep blue-grey living room, as though it’s his. “Act like you’re staying. Join the bubble.”

Teddy rolls his eyes, but he pulls back and then he’s stepping through, incongruously edgy. “Don’t get a girlfriend my age,” he suggests, as though he thinks that Harry could. As though Harry might want one. “It would not be becoming,” Teddy adds, sounding like his grandmother, who’s always had views on his parents. “And take a shower,” he suggests, looking at Harry’s ancient Puddlemere shirt and tracksuit bottoms. “You smell like a hippogriff. Think about the signals you’re sending, Merlin’s bees.”

“Cheers,” Harry replies, moving back to the sofa, scratching the rough burn on his arm. His left hand still insists that he mustn’t tell lies. The scar sets off the ring. He’s made himself a BLT, and it’s excellent, even if he says so himself. He takes another bite, not planning to shower today unless Ron and Hermione want to go out. “And I don’t want a girlfriend,” he says, munching and wiping mayonnaise from his lip.

It’s by accident, then, really, that the fifth person Harry comes out to after his wife and their counsellor and Ron and Hermione is his twenty-two-year-old orphaned, teddy-bear godson.

He’s not sure how else to explain the awkward pause, following his declaration on the girlfriend. “Look, Teds,” Harry tells his godson where he’s settling sideways into Ron and Hermione’s comfy armchair. There’s sandwich in Harry’s teeth, which he tongues. “It’s not been relevant till now,” he barrels forward, pretending that he’s known all along, “but your dad’s not straight.”

As a first reaction, Teddy frowns, his legs settled over the armchair’s low arm, his energy all static. Harry’s breath seizes even as he wants to tell him to sit up. But then –

“Yeah, I knew that,” Teddy says, sitting up on his own, bouncing, contained, uncomfortable. Which makes no sense, because Harry didn’t know before March.

It takes a moment. Teddy’s fidgeting with his anarchy ring. “Wait,” Harry starts.

“Oh fuck,” Teddy says at the same time, bouncing in the armchair, hands on the rests, his eyes growing wide and flashing amber as they meet Harry’s. “Helga – you mean _you_ ,” he says, as though the possibility has never crossed his mind.

This makes the synapses click in Harry’s head. “Are you saying –”

“When did that happen?” Teddy’s asking him. “I mean…” He blushes, which is always what he does when he fails to sound woke.

“Remus wasn’t straight?” Harry’s asking Teddy, surprised.

Teddy’s shaking his head. “He used to get off with your Sirius,” he says, and Harry cannot believe that this is true. “Gran told me. Mum wasn’t straight either; she caught her when she was in school with one of her mates –”

“With _Sirius?_ But Sirius was into –” The women wearing string bikinis, Harry remembers, thinking about his own oddly prideful reaction to his godfather’s wanking material, for the first time in years.

“Is this why you and Aunt Ginny have separated?” Teddy demands, always on the same wavelength as Harry. “Have you been getting off with Uncle Ron?”

“ _Merlin,_ ” Harry complains, looking at the fireplace. Maybe everyone’s shagging their mates, he panics, and Ron and Hermione think it’s weird he’s never asked. “ _No_ ,” he tells Teddy, for now, “you peculiar child.”

Teddy’s grinning, and then Harry’s grinning back, both of them panicking together.

“It’s something that I figured out during lockdown,” Harry decides to reveal, picking up his sandwich again.

“Oh, I get it.” With this word, whatever was confused seems to make sense to Teddy. He nods sagely, as though he will nevermore be a dizzy little bear. “Well, no one’s straight, really, are they?” is his take on Harry’s sexuality. “Not how they’re supposed to be. It’s a fantasy we’re sold by late capitalism.”

Harry doesn’t know why capitalism’s always late, when Teddy talks about it – but he also doesn’t know why he was already married before he got into sex. “Right,” he treads carefully. “So you’re saying that you’re…?”

“Nah, not really,” is what Teddy says, sitting more deeply into the armchair. His friends are so arty; he can’t possibly sit like this with them. They’ll have parties where they all sleep together. “I’ve been exclusively attracted to women in the past. Give or take a few ambiguous feelings about Professor Thompson.”

“Oh.” Professor Thompson teaches Potions and heads Hufflepuff; Harry and Andromeda used to get letters. He worked with Neville and Mungo’s on the virus cure.

“But that was inevitable,” Teddy informs Harry about his homosexual impulses. “I was taken from security and thrown into a reclusive, gender-segregated dungeon which fetishised hierarchical systems. For my adolescence, you know.”

“OK,” Harry agrees. He’s heard Teddy’s views on Hogwarts before. “Well, I think I fancy blokes,” he explains.

“That’s straightforward,” Teddy accepts. “Which ones?”

“Dunno,” Harry informs him. In his head it’s all very nebulous. “Fit ones,” he tries.

“Well,” Teddy offers supportively, blinking, “you do you, Dad, yeah.”

“Yeah,” agrees Harry, feeling supported, though he’s not sure what this means. “I’ve no interest in replacing Ginny,” he goes on, promising, thumbing his warm wedding ring by accident. “You can tell the others that, if they ask.”

“Really?” Teddy interrupts with a laugh, rather than taking this as the reassurance Harry intends. He jumps in the chair, all folding limbs and bright colours, amber eyes accusing. “That’s so sexist.”

Something in Harry puffs up at this, angry. He finishes his first sandwich and moves onto the next, sitting spread out on Ron and Hermione’s sofa. “It’s not sexist,” he insists as he munches.

“What’re you going to tell your dates?” Teddy demands, wrinkling his nose at Harry’s bacon. Harry’s rather glad that the house smells like frying pan. It’s the smell of Teddy’s roots, frying bacon, and he shouldn’t forget it. “ _Oh yeah, it’s fine,_ ” he mocks Harry, waving a hand. “ _You’re just my fancy man…_ ”

“ _Fancy man?_ ” Harry interrupts. “Why would I call him that?” he complains, the walls grey-blue around them, tasteful art hung as punctuation.

“Hook-up, then,” Teddy comes back with, quirking a sarcastic grin.

Reacting, Harry finds himself making a face. He can’t imagine hooking up with someone and just – walking away, if that’s what people do. The counsellor reckoned that he and Ginny were both monogamists – serial monogamists, supposedly – with this the reason why they both felt guilty over intimate chats and abstract thoughts. They were compatible, but these thought experiments were not.

Teddy looks smug. “Fancy man,” he confirms, tall and whip thin. Always taller than James. Taller than Harry, for years. “That’s about your level.”

Harry swallows, imagining himself walking away, dressing while a naked someone sleeps. While they wake up, roll over and ask him to stay a bit longer. It’s actually a memory, one of many. “I don’t use words like that,” he grumbles, wiping crumbs on his jogging bottoms.

“OK,” says Teddy, as though he doesn’t agree. “You know,” he adds, quite at home in Ron and Hermione’s living room, his legs in a cross underneath him, “I’ve been looking forward to you going full-on mid-life crisis.” He’s always been cheeky, Teddy Lupin. “It’s gonna be like Pikachu in a shopping mall.”

Harry gives this a moment, but really, he has no idea what Teddy means, even as he works on his sandwich.

Teddy catches on, clearly. He’s laughing.

“Look, I need tips,” Harry insists, dismissing this and all his thoughts. He waves a hand towards his edgy godson, glancing up at the portraits of Ron and Hermione’s perfect nuclear family, beautiful even through Hugo’s current toothy phase. This is all he’s ever known, when it comes to relationships. “You’ve got gay mates. What do they do?”

Teddy’s the only person he knows with gay mates. Or so Harry’s always assumed. Apparently there was Remus and Sirius and Tonks, so who knows what about anyone, really?

He’s laughing at him, Teddy. “Oh Dad,” he says, and Harry almost thinks his godson loves him. “You don’t want them. You want a nice man to take you to the pictures.”

Harry’s fairly sure that he doesn’t. “No one’s taking anyone to the pictures,” is what he says. “D’you know anyone who’s going?”

“You want him to be about sixty-five –”

“Sixty-five?!” Harry bounces on Ron and Hermione’s sofa. A tomato almost escapes. “How old d’you think I am?”

“You wanna play the toyboy,” Teddy promises, nodding. “He’ll buy you presents and call you Harrietto.”

Gut flipping, Harry finds a few of his nebulous thoughts turning to crystal. “I don’t want some old…” He doesn’t know what he wants to say for the end of this sentence, but he has a feeling that it would be offensive. It was easier being married, he thinks for the first time. “I want a bloke my own age – which is _not_ sixty-five,” Harry informs Teddy, who’s mocking him. “Someone who shares my interests. Not looking for serious, but not opposed to it either.” He thinks that this sounds like a reasonable ask for a never-serial monogamist, separated pending divorce. “How do I get that?”

Teddy’s looking at him as though he’s failing to acknowledge his privilege, or else as though he’s asking for the moon.

Harry sighs, breathing in. He smells like a hippogriff, he realises. No one’s into that. He’s owned this Puddlemere shirt for fifteen years. “Do I need to get an app?” he asks, conceding, because this is usually the answer.

Teddy rears back, as though Harry’s said something offensive. “Definitely don’t get an app,” he says. “That scene is so racist… D’you even have a phone?” he demands. His own will be in his back pocket.

This is a good point. Harry gave his children mirrors to take with them to school. He keeps them close at hand, a fold of four in his own back pocket, on the table at the moment. “Do people still put ads in the paper?” he tries instead, mostly joking.

Teddy winces. “Maybe just be single for a bit,” he advises, unhelpfully. He’s eyeing Harry’s crumby plate. “Are there any other sandwiches going?” he asks innocently, as though they fall out of the sky.

* * *

“We’re going out,” Harry tells Hermione later, fresh from the shower, because he’s decided. He’s borrowed some of Ron’s cologne, barely used, a gift from Rose and Hugo for his fortieth.

“Good Gryffindor, Harry,” is Hermione’s reaction, wrinkling her nose. Her clothes are creased from the day she’s spent at her desk, lucky cow. “What is that stuff and how much have you used? You’ll have scared off the cats.”

Ron and Hermione have two ginger cats, Fred and George. George isn’t dead, the living wizard likes to point out. Neither’s the cat, Ron likes to retort.

They also have Harry, who’s wearing one of Ron’s muggle shirts. It’s vivid navy blue, and it’s a little tight across the chest. Bloody skinny-bean Ron. “I’m sending out a signal,” Harry tries, because this is how Teddy put it. “I’m fit and on the market; that’s what I’m saying. Watch out.”

“Exactly,” says Hermione, as though Harry’s made his own point, moving to kiss her husband hello. 

“I’ve talked him down from describing it as consensual self-prostitution,” Ron offers, drinking a beer. “We’ve had Teddy round,” he explains.

“I think that we should put that on the badge,” is Hermione’s response.

“We’re going out,” Harry insists, looking up from himself, imagining the scars behind the stretched cotton of Ron’s shirt. He’s sure that this is how people pick each other up.

“Let me get changed,” Hermione allows, her mouth twitching even as she’s rolling her eyes.

But of course Harry doesn’t pull, out on the town. He fully intends to meet the man of his dreams in a meet-cute up at the bar, but he’s forgotten what it’s like. There’s no chance to mingle; they’re shown to their table and told how to order drinks and food on their phones.

“I suppose I’ll be Mum, then,” Hermione says dryly once the waiter’s gone, because she’s the only one with a mobile.

“I’ve long thought that you’d make a good mum,” Ron agrees, his sense of humour always a dad’s.

Harry tries to chat up the waiter, every time he brings them drinks, but the bloke’s in his twenties and wearing a mask, plain black. It’s difficult to tell whether the expression in his eyes is flirtation or incredulous pity.

Moreover, Harry fears, he’s in love with his friends. He feels desperate; he wants sex; he thought about it when he was getting dressed. But that feeling fades, over the course of an hour, maybe two. He didn’t see his friends enough during lockdown; he hasn’t seen them enough in the past ten years, ever since he and Hermione reached the second-last chamber of the Ministry’s maze. She’s a senior legal clerk, surely only five years away from standing for the Wizengamot, though this has been true for a decade now.

Harry loves being out with her, out with Ron, whose stories are always about making people happy and embarrassing George. He finds himself drunk and unguarded so quickly, so unusually, laughing loose and animated under a heat lamp, under the sky. He feels giddy, and that must be in part because they’re all still partly locked up.

He forgets that he’s alone, that they’re not all going home together. He forgets that he owns a massive house, which one day he’ll have to return to.

He feels like he’s married as he shuffles into bed, turning over to his side in the familiar spare room. He’s curled up in his bottoms and another ancient quidditch shirt, smelling like a teenager’s idea of good cologne. He’s still wearing his wedding ring, which he realises now is a signal of its own.

In the morning, Harry has to get up, and it doesn’t matter how much he doesn’t want to. It’s the Slytherin-Hufflepuff quidditch match, and ever since Teddy joined the team this has been an appointment he’s made every effort to keep, and Ginny with him. Teddy played keeper, originally, but these days Albus is an excellent seeker on the other side.

Albus says that he hates the comparisons, but Harry can’t believe that this is true. Two years as a reserve was enough for James to give up entirely on the idea of competing with his parents’ legacies. Harry has secret hopes for Lily and Gryffindor, because he wants to make Minerva proud – even if Minerva says that she’s proud of all four of his children.

Flooing up to Hogsmeade, hungover, barely a grunt from Ron and Hermione when he knocks on their door to say that he’s going, Harry doesn’t bank on seeing Ginny and doesn’t bank on seeing Neville, there in the magically expanding parents’ stand. He’s standing next to Ginny down in the front row. Ginny’s wearing a Slytherin scarf the way that Harry is, the way that Harry never expects her to. Neville’s wearing his Gryffindor, but this only leaves the picture absolutely perfect, Neville playing host.

It feels like returning to reality after fantasy, and Harry has a feeling that this is what the past six weeks have been. A fantasy he’s dreamt up in his head. Or maybe that’s the past twenty years.

He’s long been tall and broad, Neville, like a tree. He’s looking weathered from the virus; Harry hears that he suffers from fatigue sometimes, even now he’s recovered. He looks like someone secure, someone stable, despite this – and these are attributes Ginny’s never said that she’s attracted to.

Watching the back of Ginny and Neville’s heads, standing up behind them, on the steps – a ponytail of golden red and a mop of dusty, fusty blond, a gesture towards social distance between them – Harry thinks that it must have hit the papers. He’ll have missed it. Everyone will know.

He’s going to have to talk to them whatever, Harry panics, and he doesn’t –

“Sit down, Potter,” the voice of a Slytherin dad cuts into Harry’s spiralling thoughts. It’s reality, again. “And for Merlin’s sake, stop gawping. You’ll be the one to give it away.”

Barely listening, barely thinking about it, Harry sinks into the chair that appears by the side of his leg. A few seats away is his youngest son’s best friend’s dad – the dad of the best friend who plays chaser, passably well.

“Let us imagine,” Malfoy’s suggesting.

Harry can’t focus on anything but the back of Neville’s head, the brief turn of Ginny’s grin towards him.

“If _I_ were newly separated from my husband of twenty years,” Malfoy’s drawling, rhetorically, “and I were to visit the home and workplace of one of my close friends, would it seem odd for him to support me through the inevitable encounter with my estranged husband? Or would it seem odder for him not to show his face, as though he was somehow ashamed?”

Chilling ice cold as these words sink in, Harry turns to see Draco Malfoy, white-blond hair thinning in much the same pattern as Ron’s – they could have a competition – slouched in his Slytherin scarf and a long, black muggle coat as though he’s cold, hands in his pockets.

It’ll be his head where the hair is thin, Harry thinks. Ron’s started wearing a bobble hat from November through to spring like a baby.

The muggle coat’s no surprise, also. Malfoy’s been wearing it for years, though Harry doesn’t know why.

“You can’t tell the kids,” is what Harry says, not sure what he’s threatening, oddly conscious of his own gentle widow’s peak. He can only think that Malfoy always used to figure him out, and he’ll have been told far too much by his son, by Harry’s own. “It was mutual,” Harry insists. “No one cheated.” Or something. “We both opened doors in our heads and we’ve talked it all through.” They talked a bit, him and Ginny. Mostly they made jokes and lay next to each other in silence when they ran out, not having sex.

Tipping his chin to the sky, Malfoy shuts his eyes as though pained. He begs, shaking his head, _Potter, shut up._ He glares, and Harry realises that mums and dads are bustling everywhere around them, clattering up and down the steps to say hello to each other. Hufflepuff parents are always aflutter.

Harry pulls his cloak around himself, feeling exposed. _Sorry._

Malfoy sighs, and Harry realises that nothing he’s not saying is for his own benefit.

A little startled by this, as his heart rate settles down, it strikes Harry that Malfoy’s not aflutter. He comes to these matches on his own, and he sits with no one to talk to. They’ve shared nods. He’s not one of the popular Slytherin dads, which Harry found surprising the first time he grit his teeth and went to the pub with them. Instead, Malfoy’s tolerated, because he has a Slytherin child and that’s the requirement – it’s the same with the other dads and Harry. The old guard dislike Malfoy for selling them out after the war, though none of them say that it’s that. The new guard dislike him for all the torturing he did.

He’s an outsider, Malfoy, these days, and he’s watching Harry now, his eyes too sharp. There’s something slightly seedy about him, Harry supposes, glancing over his familiar pointed face, surely too well-kept for a forty-year-old. His hair’s going, but his skin is clean and sharp. His features have set like his mother’s, like he’s smelling something bad, though of course he smells good. He looks groomed and it makes him look sleazy, maybe, something like that. Something that proves Harry a retrograde, bigoted relic. Something that makes him think of sex and feel it as a deep, impossible itch. He wants to say something cutting and dismissive, to make it go away.

Harry doesn’t realise what he’s doing, looking at Malfoy and thinking about sex. The other side of the equation raises his eyebrows, but Harry doesn’t realise what this means. He’s never picked up anyone, as an adult.

There’s no chance for them to talk. The teams are emerging. Harry’s arrived as late as he could.

He jumps and his attention’s drawn to Ginny as the commentary starts and everyone’s cheering. “ _ALBUS POTTAAAAAH!_ ” she’s shouting, leaning over the barrier, banging it and shouting louder than any of the Hufflepuff parents; with more open enthusiasm than anyone else here for Slytherin. It makes Harry feel like a lion, in the wrong stand. “ _ALBUS POTTAAAAAH!_ ”

When Albus flies past them, it’s his mum that he looks to, grinning self-consciously. He’s in fourth year now and his jaw is increasingly sharp. In certain lights his dark hair looks brown, but it’s really dark red. He gets freckles.

He does a barrel roll and his eyes touch on Harry’s, bright Slytherin green. Really, he’s his grandmother’s child.

Harry finds himself smiling faintly, which is all he’s ever managed with his Slytherin son. Lily Luna calls them repressed, because she’s getting increasingly cheeky. Observant. A Weasley through and through.

“Oh.” And that’s Ginny’s voice. She must have turned to look. When Harry glances down, she’s turned back and Neville’s saying something, low, the Don Juan.

The match is just about to start. Scorpius flies up and shoves Albus on the shoulder, distracting him, leading him back to the cluster of Slytherin brooms. They share a joke, private and introverted – like Harry when he’s being true to himself.

Before Scorpius goes, his eyes meet his father’s, their features equally haughty and twitchy and pale, though Scorpius’s hair is a slightly more golden shade of blond.

Malfoy doesn’t shout; he only nods. Scorpius nods too, before he flies away.

“Your son has been doing better,” is all Malfoy says, putting Harry off.

* * *

The match is won by Slytherin in less than twenty minutes. It’s a stylish, confident match, and Harry finds it calming to watch. Albus has always flown well when working though his emotions. It’s something Ginny does too, and Harry doesn’t understand it. His own emotions leave him a mess.

The dads are in fine form after the match, at the pub. Inviting parents to quidditch began around the time that Teddy started at Hogwarts and it was part of a plan to modernise relations between parents and the school. The parents act as though it’s a ritual older than time, and it’s the same whether Harry’s up at Hogwarts as a Hufflepuff dad or a Slytherin, maybe a Gryffindor one day. The mums and dads always separate, and Harry thinks it’s so that they can talk about sex: the dads occupy the Three Broomsticks while the mums occupy Madam Puddifoot’s; the mums drink their coffees while the dads drink their beers, and the dads let their wives decide when it’s time to go home through the floo.

The muggle parents never come, because there’s no way for them travel so far for only the morning. By the time Teddy left Hogwarts this had clearly only led to more social segregation, but there was no going back, and the absence of any muggles only adds to the antiquated feeling of these lunches, morning sessions, afternoon quick ones. If there are any same-sex couples with children involved in Hogwarts quidditch, Harry supposes for the first time, this time, while the Slytherin dads are talking about something else, they must very sensibly give this part a miss.

It feels like something from the seventies, really, the after-match social, though it’s not an all-white affair. In most households, Harry knows, the dads take it further by collapsing on the sofa for a sleep the moment they get home, while the mums get on with writing letters to the children, picking up shopping, touching up the housework, buzzed and alert into the evening.

No one admits it, but Harry knows it happens. It doesn’t fit in with anyone’s idea of modern life, so the whole thing is hidden by cognitive dissonance. Harry used to try to stay awake, but he works long weeks without a regimen, while Ginny has a strict routine, and he used to find himself sleepy after the excitement of quidditch and the beers.

For the first after-match social of 2020, 2021, Harry no longer has a wife to pick him up. It takes becoming last one left with Malfoy for Harry to remember it.

“She’s not coming,” Malfoy points out, when Harry looks down at his watch.

They’re sitting outside, naturally. They’ve been taking over the space. The Broomsticks’ beer garden is pavement then grass, which breaks into apple trees – now nearly ready to be picked. Harry doesn’t know why they never came out here in school.

At Malfoy’s comment, Harry startles and meets mocking eyes. He realises what he’s doing, waiting for Ginny, but very little else.

Chiding himself, he looks down at his empty pint on the table, the prompt for him checking the time. Malfoy’s glass is empty to its last swallow too, its streaks of foam looking sad. The last two other dads have just left.

“D’you feel like another?” Harry asks, looking up, not sure what they’ve been talking about. Quidditch and sex is the chat at these things.

He has nothing to get home to, he thinks. Ron and Hermione might like the peace.

Malfoy looks at him solidly, cold in his coat, as though Harry’s not realised what he’s getting himself into. “Why not?” he asks ominously, making a joke only he understands.

Scooping up their glasses, a few of the others, Harry heads up the garden to buy them two more pints. Rosmerta, at least, isn’t making her customers use an app. The wizarding world has a cure, thanks to Neville and Thompson and the Mungo’s team, and Rosmerta’s happy with orders taken at a window, though she no longer fronts the bar herself.

“I’m not sure that I’ve ever said I’m sorry,” Harry reports when he returns, putting down their pints on the table. It’s a bright day, but Harry’s glad of his scarf. Molly knitted it in green and pale grey, proud of her Slytherin grandchild no matter that all the others are in Gryffindor. “You know,” Harry fumbles, “about Astoria…”

Malfoy blinks, picking up his pint. Harry couldn’t remember what he’s been drinking, so he took a guess on something hoppy. It’s the wrong colour, he realises now.

“Oh, there’s no need,” is what Malfoy says, letting out a short laugh before he drinks. His scarf is only dark green. It looks like cashmere. He doesn’t seem to mind what he’s been given. “It was better for everyone, really.”

Harry frowns, drinking his standard. “I thought she…” He remembers being told that Astoria had died, that Malfoy was bereaved. Scorpius had only just started at Hogwarts. He must have been –

There’s another laugh, a twinkle in Malfoy’s serpentine eyes, and he shakes his head. “Potter, who _have_ you been listening to?” he asks rhetorically.

He looks off into the easy quiet of the beer garden, now, a pair of old wizards yarning in the corner and otherwise only the Hufflepuff debris taking up the tables.

“Astoria’s not dead,” Malfoy goes on, looking back. “That is simply what’s said in certain circles when an English pureblood witch runs off with a foreign lothario.” He’s joking, oddly private about it. “Leo’s Austrian or German – Swiss, I forget.” This is Harry’s son’s best friend’s dad; they’re talking about his stepdad and mum. “They have a villa in Spain. Scorpius visits in the summer.”

“Oh,” Harry says, feeling thick.

With his teeth, Malfoy grins.

Somehow, they keep talking. Malfoy natters on about Astoria’s new life, his voice oddly fond while Harry drinks his pint. He’d like to sound like this about Ginny and Neville one day, Harry thinks, rather than petty and bitter.

“So it was Longbottom, then?” Malfoy asks eventually, a few inches of beer behind Harry now.

“Not really,” Harry tells him, wrinkling his nose. He’s sick of talking about it, he decides, six-to-eight weeks in. “It was a lot of things. Say, Malfoy –” he decides to change the subject, creaking on the picnic bench and pulling his cloak across his leg, because it’s chilly, Scotland in October, and life can be ironic. “D’you know anyone who’s gay?”

Choking on his pint, Malfoy swallows and glances at the old wizards in the corner again. “What?” he throws back, laughing at something on Harry’s face and sucking in his bottom lip with his teeth instead of wiping his mouth. It makes Harry think of sex.

“I don’t know anyone who’s gay,” Harry tells him, disturbed by himself, and Malfoy looks confused. Harry agrees. It’s been odd, realising how he looks at men. The way he must always have looked at them. “It’s 2020, right?” he tells Malfoy. “That’s weird.”

“I –” Malfoy pauses, looking around them again. “I’m not sure where to start. Did you and Luna have a row without her telling me?” he suggests, a way away from Harry over the wooden table.

Harry forgets that Luna’s friendly with Malfoy. It’s not something anyone brings up. “What’s Luna got to do with it?”

“It’s not Luna I’m talking about,” Malfoy mocks him. “It’s her wife.”

“What?” demands Harry, and it makes Malfoy laugh.

Harry can taste beer on his on breath. He would have remembered this, he’s sure.

“Luna’s not gay,” he insists. They don’t see each other much, Harry supposes. She’s always been Ginny’s friend.

“She hates labels,” Malfoy agrees, expression openly amused. “She’s old-fashioned that way. But she’s been married to Anya since 2008. Since it became legal.” He switches a finger through the air. “Before they banned it and allowed it again.”

And Harry needs something else to say, but he has nothing – “What?”

Still laughing, Malfoy’s teeth aren’t perfectly white, but they are straight and sharp. “In California,” he says, as though Harry’s a punchline. “Where Anya lives and Luna spends half the year.”

Maybe this is why he and Luna don’t see each other much, Harry thinks.

Malfoy keeps pushing, as though he’s going to spark a memory. “Loo would have moved years ago if she wanted to work as an adjunct and live in fear of her house falling down. Burning up in a fire.” He says this as though Luna’s prone to sarcasm, as though Harry should imagine her throwing up her hands, frustrated, instead of dreamy and forever sixteen.

And the thing is, Harry’s a successful senior auror. He’s not slow and he’s not unobservant. He doesn’t know how he’s ever missed this. He can’t have done; he’s sure of it.

He can be somewhat divorced from reality. It’s at least part of the reason for his very real divorce.

“You weren’t at the wedding because your children had griffinpox,” Malfoy informs him as though throwing him a bone, as though they’ve been in each other’s circles for years. “You’ll have put your name on the card.”

Harry doesn’t remember putting his name on the card. Ginny might have done it. In 2008, he supposes, he was earning promotion and getting blown up, though that was in 2009. He was losing his ability to look at himself in the shower. Maybe he had something on.

Sighing, giving up, Harry thumps an elbow on the table and rubs a hand across the front of his face, bothering his glasses and squeezing shut his eyes. “I must not’ve updated my records,” he says, because it’s true that when he fucks up, it’s usually because of his poor administration.

“Well, that is the dream,” Malfoy reflects, drinking his pint. He sounds more amused than judging. Harry wonders if Ginny knew that he thought their married friend was straight. Or at least that he never realised she was married to a woman. “One hardly hopes that their friends get out the ink and stamp _GAY_ all over their memories.”

The phrasing of this is too familiar. Harry finds himself looking at Malfoy’s ironic expression. He’s swallowing, and the bob of his throat makes Harry think of sex.

“Oh yes,” Malfoy seems to recall, here in this garden, nothing but a git. He smirks and sits up with his pint, much too content. “You know me too,” he observes, because they’ve been socialising casually for years, as Slytherin dads. As Luna’s friends, Harry supposes. “Cheers,” he agrees, glancing down at Harry’s Slytherin scarf.

“Cheers,” Harry says, not clinking their glasses. He sips.

“Was that the only reason you asked?” continues Malfoy forthrightly, smirking as though he already knows. “Blissful ignorance?”

Harry doesn’t realise what he’s getting himself into.


	3. October, November

Rather than come out to Malfoy in the garden of the Three Broomsticks, Harry bottles it – no matter that Malfoy’s just come out to him, which feels unnecessary and kind. He knows that it’s 2020; he knows that it shouldn’t be a big deal. Nevertheless, he finds himself insisting that he’s only been considering these things because Teddy has gay mates and he thinks that maybe Lily…

It’s terrible, Harry knows, to make up lies about his children to protect himself. But then, Harry realises even as he says this, Lily’s held the opinion since age ten that her mum’s best friend Luna (her own middle namesake) must be the most fabulous, most funniest, most beautiful person in the world – much more beautiful than Victoire, Teddy, obviously…

This is something to think about later, Harry decides, though he wonders if his daughter’s eyes might not have opened his own. Once, James tried to tell his sister that she shouldn’t talk about Luna _like that_ , and Ginny informed him that Lily was allowed to call beautiful anyone she liked. James was embarrassed, saying that he only meant to say that Luna was one of their aunts and so _old_ …

The children see Luna more often than Harry does. He should write to her, he thinks, though he’s not sure how to apologise the way that he’d like.

When Ginny told Harry about the incident with James, because Harry wasn’t there, she asked what he thought about Lily’s campaign to crown Luna queen of the world. Harry said it was cute, which it was: Lily’s so chatty and positive when she’s excited. He’s always thought it part of youth, to see beauty. He’s not sure what Ginny had him agreeing to, looking back, though he expects that he doesn’t disagree. The line about Lily being cute made Ginny smile and sparkle at him, which he liked.

He doesn’t tell Ron or Hermione about Malfoy when he gets back from Hogsmeade, though he expects that they don’t know. They would have mentioned it, he thinks, if only in passing. Ron’s a gossip, and for the moment Harry’s not sure… Really, he’s embarrassed to have been drinking with Malfoy at all. He’s not home till four, long after a Three Broomsticks fish-and-chips lunch.

Ron and Hermione don’t ask him where he’s been, but Harry supposes that the match could have gone on until two.

It takes Harry a while to make sense of his encounter with Malfoy, as it is, in a way that belongs to a decade other than this. _Gay,_ Harry finds himself thinking for the second half of October, he fears quite homophobically. Certainly panicked; he doesn’t think about sex with Ron or Hermione at all, even as everyone’s told to stop eating out and stay in to help out instead. _Malfoy is gay_ , he finds himself thinking, imagining his eyes and teeth, his mouth in a smirk. _Draco Malfoy_. His nemesis Malfoy, with Pansy Parkinson stroking his hair. _He takes off his clothes and goes to bed…_

Nebulously, Harry used to imagine Malfoy and his wife going to bed in nightclothes cut as high as Malfoy’s dress robes in fourth year, stiff and formal with someone flicking a wand at the light. Now he knows that he takes men to bed, Harry imagines Malfoy waking up relaxed, not wearing a stitch, propping himself on the pillows and nattering, half covered in a sheet and always smirking, conceited, rolling to his back and stretching arms behind his head to witter something sarcastic at the ceiling.

He’s young, when Harry imagines this – but everyone is, in Harry’s head. The important point is that he seems comfortable with himself, his naked body, that of whomever he’s chattering to.

Ginny’s always been comfortable with her body; she keeps in perfect shape. She likes to show herself off. Harry always did find that attractive, even as he became increasingly frustrated with himself for not completing the picture.

In Harry’s head, Malfoy’s sexuality is quite a lot like Ginny’s – proud and open – but also different, more like something he could emulate, if he tried. Less sports bras and ponytails and summery shorts, more roll-neck jumpers and slim trousers and coats until the end of the day. Harry’s nothing but muscle and vinegar, after all, even if his chest stretches Ron’s shirts. He can look all right in clothes.

Returning to work, Harry has to deal with everything that’s found its way to his desk while he was on sabbatical. He’s eventually distracted from Malfoy’s sexuality when he learns that Ginny’s renting somewhere in Hogsmeade, which he didn’t know but should have guessed, what with Neville.

James and Albus find out when Ginny suggests they stop by on the Halloween Hogsmeade weekend – so that she can give them some lunch and sweets to take away, like a wicked witch. Like someone who’s accepted that she has a maternal nerve after all. Harry finds himself talking to James about it on their mirror.

“Mum and Professor Longbottom have always been friends, haven’t they, Dad?” James asks for reassurance, the Friday before the Halloween Hogsmeade weekend.

Harry finds it funny, that his children have these momentous names for what’s only Ginny and Neville and him. “He’s one of my oldest friends too,” Harry says with a shrug as though everything’s fine. “Your mum and me and Professor Longbottom will always be friends,” is what he promises.

“Hm,” James reads between the lines, a frown on his unscarred forehead in the mirror. He’s increasingly canny as well as competitive, less rowdy since Lily started at school. Harry expects all of his children to choose Ginny, when they have to. “There’s rumours here,” is what James says. “I think they’re getting Lily down.”

Since the age of seven, if not younger, James has been reporting on Lily’s emotions as a way to talk about his own. They used to think that he’d grow out of it. “There’s always rumours,” is what Harry says, sitting on the bed in Ron and Hermione’s spare room. It’s time that he went home to number 12, he tells himself, before that rumour starts spreading too. “What have I told you?”

“Not to listen,” James supplies, rolling his eyes.

He’s sitting in an empty classroom, from what Harry can see. It’s past the hour when sixth years should be out, but that’s not Harry’s disciplinary problem. He tries to avoid blatant hypocrisy.

“Dad, what’s happening at Christmas?” James asks, the words weighted.

“You’re coming home,” Harry says. They’ve already been over this. “Your mum’ll be there – here,” he corrects himself, lying, ignoring the Granger-Weasley bedclothes, blue. “For Christmas Day.”

Scoffing, James meets his eyes through the mirror. “I know that you’re at Ron and Hermione’s,” he informs Harry, too grown up to call them Uncle and Aunt. He has so many uncles and aunts; it used to make conversations confusing. And it was so easy to lie to them, when they were young. “Teddy’s been posting angsty shots of Kreacher on Kazamagram.”

Teddy’s not moved out yet, it’s true. The room in Hackney had a window he couldn’t shut, he said. And he’s doing Harry a favour, eating Kreacher’s food.

“It’s fine,” James promises, as though permitting Harry to experience emotion. He has dark eyes like Ginny and maybe Harry’s father. Harry can never remember. “But there’s no point us coming back for Christmas if you’re not gonna be around to have us.” These words are weighted too.

“I’ll be around to have you!” Harry insists, because he’s going back to number 12 in the morning, he’s decided just now. He looks around the room he’s in, homey and serene. It’s not where he lives, he reminds himself. “Christmas’ll be different, but it’ll be Christmas, I promise.”

The edge of Harry’s folding case of mirrors is hard in his hand, digging in much like his wedding ring, which clacked against the case when he grabbed it off the nightstand.

He’s sitting up in bed, talking to his son. James is looking back at him, wearing glasses much larger than Harry’s, though that makes him look cool, apparently. He doesn’t seem impressed by Harry’s promises. “What if we don’t want it to be Christmas?” he’s demanding, obtuse, and he should have shaved this morning, the way that Harry should have shaved too. “What if we don’t want Mum there?”

“Then you can put up with her anyway,” Harry tells his son, anger in his throat at this disloyalty. “And you can have a lecture from your Auntie Hermione about listening to hearsay.”

“Maybe we won’t come home at all,” James retorts, clenching his jaw. His eyes flash, accusing, and Harry knows that he shouldn’t make promises about Christmas.

“Well, you don’t have to,” Harry agrees, much too reckless, less self-controlled than his own fucking children. “But I don’t want you splitting up. You can talk to Lily and you can talk to Albus –”

“What d’you think I’ve been doing for the past two months?” James reacts, flaring up. “I’ve got NEWTs, for fuck’s sake. Prefect’s –”

“You have to look after each other; what did I tell you –?”

“You’ve never told us anything, Dad.” And then he calls Harry a hypocrite. He swears. A sweep of fingers in the mirror and the connection is dropped. Harry’s only looking at his own tired face, so much older than his son’s, than his own father’s ever had a chance to be.

James is older than Harry was when he lost Sirius, now. Remus died at thirty-eight. Arthur’s still going, but he never left Misuse of Muggle Artefacts, which these days is practically defunct.

Throwing down the mirror to the bedclothes, Harry’s blood is hot with frustration. The swiping’s a phone thing; the mirrors work with intent. The children swipe at everything these days, always expecting something to happen, which in their world often means that it does.

There was something Malfoy said, in the pub after the Hufflepuff match. Harry asked him about coming out to Astoria. It had never been needed, Malfoy said, because Astoria always knew. Coming out is an awkward affair because it is an exercise in correcting ignorance, he said, but in his case there was only his own. Dear Astoria was patient.

He needs to correct his own ignorance, Harry thinks, before his children lose patience with him.

* * *

When Malfoy spoke about coming out – when Harry pushed him – he expressed the view that it had only ever been about becoming himself. Harry gave him a look and Malfoy made a face, disgusted by the dippiness of his own phrasing, but Harry knew what he meant, even as they laughed and changed the subject. It had been about becoming comfortable with himself. Harry hasn’t been comfortable in years.

The idea of Malfoy becoming comfortable with himself sparked Harry’s first thought of him luxuriating in bed, which for now Harry’s classing as the same sort of thought which sees him coming onto Ron and/or Hermione. Because the idea is obviously ridiculous. He’s looking for a bloke his own age who shares his interests – he’s not looking for _Malfoy_.

Still, it was a surprisingly real conversation in the Broomsticks – Harry remembers it from beginning to end. It made him accept – not with panic, at last, but with finality – that he doesn’t know who he’s become as a father of three, really four, more senior at work than anyone he’s ever thought of as family. He likes to wake up, wash and dress in the space of ten minutes, never thinking about what he looks like; he needs to, because he never has much time. He’s a scarred wreck who’s still wearing an outdated wedding ring, and it frightens him to think that there’s only forward from here, never back.

The next morning, his sons are due in Hogsmeade, where Ginny will be giving them sweets. Harry tells Ron and Hermione his plans over breakfast, which they acknowledge with little more than a shrug. He says he can’t promise that he won’t be throwing himself on their mercy by Monday, again, after work, but today he expects Teddy to be out or hungover or busy, whatever; the Ministry wants them to respect the muggle lockdown, so he’s going to spend the weekend in number 12, sort out his and Ginny’s bedroom or decide on another, see if the house needs anything. He might get called in.

“Whatever works, Harry,” Hermione tells him, reading the paper the way that wizards and witches still do. Ron’s made him fried eggs. “You’re always welcome here.”

Harry loves them more than anything, he sometimes thinks, forgetting the rest of the world.

Emerging from the floo, the first thing Harry does is call for and cry all over Kreacher, pulling the ancient elf to his hip for a hug. Because the house is loud and huge, but so clean and tidy compared to how he left it, and Harry loves his loyal house elf of a loyal twenty years.

“Kreacher, what have you done?”

They tend to row as their way of communicating. Over a decade ago, is Harry’s point now, they agreed that an elf in his eighties should only have to cook, and not all the time. There’s no way that Teddy’s been dusting, whatever Kreacher tries to pretend.

“He’s only twenty-two,” Harry challenges, sniffing, looking around the formal living room’s burnt orange walls, holding Kreacher to him. The house has high ceilings and period features, Hermione’s always made excuses for the colour.

There’s clutter too. Harry’s the one who used to tidy and clean, however much he slept after quidditch. He was raised to see dust and eventually he started to.

“He thinks the dirt eats itself,” Harry insists about Teddy, because he knows that this is true. “I know you’re lying, Kreacher.”

“Master Harry is home now,” is all Kreacher says, his small body warm. He pats a frail hand on his.

Teddy emerges at the commotion in his dressing gown and novelty slippers, hungover, not from cleaning, so they have a long second breakfast and chat. Harry looks through the photos he’s been taking of Kreacher and they seem good to him. Arty. They’re frozen photographs, muggle-style, in black and white, and Teddy says that he wants to capture more characters and creatures this way.

“I think they get to the brutal reality. You know, about our world,” he says, despite having let Kreacher do all the cleaning. Harry makes a note to tell Andromeda that Teddy called the wizarding world _ours_.

When Harry thinks of the wizarding world, it’s true that he thinks of bright colours, and bright colours can mask many things. They’re the colours he and Ginny painted the house, and he still likes them: the downstairs living room is orange and the one upstairs, the old playroom, is paint-box lavender purple. They make the pictures on the wall look jaunty, and when things are clean and tidy they look a lot like happiness.

“Don’t you think they’re a bit… Bleak?” Harry finds himself asking, looking at the black-and-white pictures. Kreacher looks like he’s about to break down from the problem that has no name.

It takes very little for number 12 to look like chaos. At Ron and Hermione’s it requires a full bottle of red wine being spilled – and even then it’s obvious that a simple spell will clean it up.

This happened when Harry was ranting about Ginny in September.

“I don’t like to think of our world like that.”

“Me and my mates reckon we were all born too late,” Teddy tells him, flicking through the images, and Harry feels sad for him, because this cannot be true. At his age Harry was four years out of a war. “Look; I did this one on a filter.” He hands over the phone. “I thought that it was too naff to post. Who does filters anymore?”

Sick of jeans and tracksuit bottoms, quidditch shirts and the robes he wears for work, Harry looks through his bedroom wardrobes for something else to put on. Something more like him, who is now, who he’s become. Less tight than Malfoy’s stuff, because he’s not a fucking poser. Ginny’s been by several times, it turns out, and all her things are packed. A good amount has been left boxed away in one of the spare rooms, presumably waiting for her to find a permanent new home.

Harry doesn’t know whether it’s a courtesy that she finished packing while he was away, or an inconvenience that she’s left so many boxes behind. They don’t belong to each other anymore, so he doesn’t know why her stuff is still here, belonging to him.

The wardrobes seem empty, barely half-full of only his things. It’s like he’s browsing in a shop or away at a hotel. He doesn’t recognise his robes or the muggle shirts he owns, his jeans and trousers. The cuts are wrong and nothing looks flattering; other things are just falling apart. Together, they look like the clothes of someone proud of not looking good, someone insecure about looking too gay, a husband or a dad, someone insisting that he doesn’t have to try. Someone who earns Arthur Weasley’s old salary, rather than his.

Harry bought most of his clothes over ten years ago, before promotion, before he stopped looking at his body in the mirror.

He wants to love and feel loved, he’s decided. It’s what he must have wanted with Ginny – it’s what he had with Ginny for decades, he’d insist. But from the day when their first child was born and maybe before that, it’s never been the sum of what their relationship is about. Was about. Will always be.

He wants to slip away from a party and be whispered to, Harry thinks, to whisper things, grinning, out of sight. He wants the opposite of getting married, of being put on display. He wants to feel certain that he’s loved for who he’s become, and not feel like he’s become a disappointment.

He wants to reach down a hand and find something hard he can manipulate, and in his head for some reason these feelings are connected. Really, he thinks, it’s about starting again.

Looking at his clothes, exposed by the lack of Ginny’s things in the wardrobe, Harry finds himself conjuring a bin bag and shoving everything he can’t bear inside it, keeping his dress robes only because they were expensive and he’s worn each set no more than once or twice.

By the end he’s left with what he took to Ron and Hermione’s, because he’s always done his best work by instinct. He needs more pale-coloured shirts, he concludes, in soft cotton. They keep him cool; he tends to sweat.

He keeps one thing he finds when chucking out his old, knackered belts: the olive-green tweed cap his children bought for his fortieth, this year. They were taking the piss, Harry knows and knew at the time, but he didn’t mind the joke. Ginny laughed the loudest.

He pulls on the hat over the crown of his head, and he likes how it looks with the shirt he’s put on, blue chambray and ironed, but not stiff. He keeps his hair trimmed short; it’s a mixture of black and some grey. The shirt’s collar hides the slashes on the back of his neck which make him look like he’s been in a knife fight; the sleeves hide the rough burn on his right upper arm. The green in the hat makes his eyes glint as though he has a purpose in life.

He’s wearing proper trousers, like an old man, but that’s what he is now, Harry decides. He’s forty years old and divorcing. His body’s a wreck, but his trousers fit, so. He’s a hipster, ten years too late.

He’s not a hipster really, he knows, but he could grow a beard. He could make his own jam.

And he hates not shaving, he remembers – it reminds him of hunting down horcruxes – but he finds himself wanting a sandwich, thinking about jam, and when he goes to the kitchen he discovers that Teddy’s not been keeping anything in.

Clothes taken to the recycling point, Harry finds his way to Jermyn Street, which is where he knows through osmosis or else imagination that old muggle men like to shop. He wants a coat. He’ll be wearing cloaks with his uniform until the day he retires, but Malfoy’s been wearing muggle coats for years to social occasions. This clearly means that it’s acceptable to wear one in magical circles – though Malfoy might just wear his to piss off the old Slytherins; he’ll have to ask – and in any case, something with buttons or a zip down the front is more practical against the wind, and winter’s coming in.

Harry’s own muggle coat is a ratty polyester-woollen thing. It’s decades old – he remembers buying it to wear when picking up Teddy from primary school. He throws it in the bin after he buys a waxed Barbour jacket in brownish green, fitted but not tight because he likes having room to move his shoulders – one good thing about cloaks. The coat has so many pockets; Harry wants to fill them the way that he remembers Hagrid’s pockets being full. It’s a coat for the weekend, says the man in the shop.

He buys new socks and underwear, because his own have all been chucked. He buys a book about growing fruit from the Piccadilly Waterstones, though he expects that hipsters learn everything online. He goes into Fortnum and Mason’s and buys too much expensive jam, because he feels like he’s reached a point in his life where he should feel comfortable spending good money on things he enjoys. He buys biscuits and tea, because he’s fond of those too. He tells the woman proudly that he’s not making a hamper; “It’s all just for me.”

They’re both wearing masks; it feels like a game.

Hearing himself, Harry realises how selfish he sounds, so he agrees to look at hampers and buys one for Ron and Hermione to say thanks for having him. He goes too far, but the shop at least will deliver the massive thing to his house instead of making him carry it home – because he’s an auror and he shouldn’t really be vanishing hampers in any muggle part of London. He wonders if he should buy a second hamper for Ginny, to say thanks for the marriage, promise that he was never unfaithful, not that he noticed, that he’s sorry – but he expects that he’s getting lost in his head at this point.

On the way home, Harry stops for a pint at the Leaky. He leafs through his book, sitting at one of the sad little tables in the alleyway. The wind is cold and rushing, but he’s grown used to fresh air.

No one recognises Harry with his cap and his Barbour, mask now off his face. Lee Jordan’s drinking inside, but it ends up being Harry who goes to say hello. It’s nice, even as they stand far apart.

“I’m thinking about growing fruit for jam,” Harry tells Lee, explaining his book.

“I’m thinking about getting a pet,” Lee tells Harry, clearly also at a loose end. “I was always fond of Legs Eleven. My tarantula,” he explains.

“You should go for it, mate,” Harry suggests. Part of him wants to ask if Lee’s ever suffered unjust treatment from the Ministry – with specific reference to the years since 2000, rather than during the decades before. They’re finishing an inquiry and Harry’s representing the DMLE; he’d like to know if the findings make common sense. But Harry’s not at work now and this seems like an awkward, confrontational question.

“Maybe I will,” Lee agrees about the pet, grinning, and they go their separate ways. He doesn’t ask about the divorce.

“Kreacher,” Harry says when he returns to number 12. “I think we need a greenhouse.” With a _crack_ , Kreacher apparates, ever prompt. “D’you know how to build a greenhouse?”

“Of course, Master Harry,” Kreacher tells him croaking, affronted, his ears long and withered. A well-raised house elf never says no.

They spend Sunday building a greenhouse, the children’s playframe still standing on the grass when it should have long been taken down. Harry can’t bear to do it, this last thing.

The greenhouse comes out a bit wonky, but it’s in direct sun and Harry thinks that it’ll function all right. The playframe is holding one side of it up.

“How goes it, Pika-dad?” Teddy asks when Harry comes back inside. He’s up and dressed because it’s late afternoon.

“D’you feel like a damson-and-claret-jam sandwich?” Harry asks, ignoring the cheek. He uses his hat to wipe the sweat from his forehead. The tweed’s kept the drizzle off too. “I think it’s time for sandwiches.”

“Kreacher’s taking the sourdough out of the oven,” Teddy confirms, refusing to acknowledge that he knows what claret is. “We can cut off the crusts and have triangles,” he suggests. “Just for you.”

Harry finds himself beaming at him.

* * *

On Monday, there’s a picture in the _Daily Prophet_ of Neville and Ginny, looping through their chaste kisses at sunset outside the high gates of Hogwarts. They look domestic. Ginny looks young.

Harry’s still wearing his wedding ring, but he doesn’t think that it’s right for the _Prophet_ to call it an affair. Ginny always said that nothing like this happened before she and Neville stopped meeting up. They’ve been officially separated for two months; it’s not Ginny’s fault that Harry finds it difficult to live in reality.

The Monday edition is delivered to Kreacher at exactly five o’clock in the morning, fresh from the office in London. Early access to the _Prophet_ is one of the reasons professional witches and wizards like to live in the city, because otherwise the owls have further to fly. Despite himself – and he’s a senior professional; such things come with the territory – Harry tries not to wake up at five o’clock in the morning unless there’s an explicit reason why he should. Today, Kreacher presents him with the paper and a pretence that last night Harry requested breakfast in bed. “Before the important meeting, Master Harry. Very early.”

“Thank you, Kreacher,” Harry acknowledges the kindness of this lie.

Taking the paper with a deep breath, Harry watches the loop for about thirty seconds, maybe a minute, maybe five, before he gets up and dresses, the next two hours spent on frantic patronuses back and forth to Minerva about how he wants to handle the children, trying to catch and missing Ginny, sticking his head in the floo. He doesn’t want the kids going blindly into breakfast; he doesn’t want anyone seeing a teacher come to get them out of bed.

In the end Harry’s forced to knock on Teddy’s door, to make him wake up and text their group chat.

 _POTTERPIN ALERT!_ goes out the message, in a dashing run of Teddy’s hyper-opposable thumbs. He’s wearing an ancient, swampy t-shirt in bed, which might well have once been Dudley Dursley’s. There are holes in the seams, but there are graphics on the front from the eighties, which will be undoubtedly why it was stolen. _Go to breakfast at McG’s; don’t go to the hall. Pika-dad will meet you there with Pika-jam and toast. It’s Code Paparazzi, OK?_

“I dunno what this Pika thing is,” Harry points out, annoyed when Teddy shows him the message to check.

“Say _pika_ again,” Teddy suggests, resolutely good-humoured in the morning, even when he’s hungover. He does a voice, sending the message. “ _Pikapi!_ ”

It’s a surreal few hours, before Harry goes into work.

He and Ginny don’t shout at each other at least, when everyone’s arrived in Minerva’s warm office. She looks at him, distraught, in her training kit because she was putting the Magpies through their paces when she heard. Harry shrugs at her. Teddy’s gone off to his job and Harry’s sent in a patronus.

Albus calls Neville _fucking basic,_ and Harry can see how Minerva feels forced into a corner, because she can’t afford to lose her authority, nor that of her staff.

“Ten points from Slytherin, Mr Potter,” she says in her most headteacherly voice, her broad desk covered in used plates like a grandmother’s. “For profanity and disrespect.” The name of the house is surreal.

“She’s broken up our family for a fucking garden gnome,” Albus shouts at his headmistress, on his feet, which rounds it up to twenty-five and detention.

Ginny’s stood at Harry’s side, her jaw tight and her demeanour like iron, unashamed. Harry experiences an odd urge to take her hand, which must be for him because Ginny clearly doesn’t need it. “Neville is _not_ a garden gnome,” she spits proudly. “Professor Longbottom,” she corrects herself. “And this family will never be broken, Albus Potter,” she recovers her thread.

Albus moves to answer back –

Harry interrupts him. “Albus Severus, be quiet,” he says, hearing violence in his voice. It’s all he’s ever managed, this audible violence, but his son goes bright red and shuts up.

Their youngest, because third time’s the charm, has never been cowed by Harry’s violent tone of voice. Het up now and twelve years of age – the spit of Ginny when she was small – little Lily Luna can’t let the argument go. She’s snapping at her brother, in the silence, “Dad’s decided he’s a pikachu –”

“You’re such a baby –” immediately Albus retorts, still embarrassed.

“You saw that greenhouse!”

James is looking at Harry, as if he should know how to intervene.

“At least Professor Longbottom’s not an _actual_ embarrassment –”

Ginny intervenes. “Lily, that’s enough.”

Harry doesn’t know how Lily’s seen the greenhouse; he and Kreacher only built it yesterday. He assumes that it must have been on their Potterpins group.

“It’s not enough,” Lily’s saying, angry at the world and fierce. Melodramatic; she’s twelve. “He thinks he can pretend –”

“ _Lily._ ”

Albus is looking between his sister and his parents, clenching his jaw as though waiting for Lily to be humiliated like he’s been. But the problem is that Lily never takes things to heart the same way as Albus. Harry doesn’t know how to shout at her.

“Fuck this Gryffindor shit,” Albus sneers eventually as though life is unfair, looking at Harry, picking up his bag to storm his way out of Minerva’s office.

“That’s fifty points from Slytherin, Mr Potter, and you can see me every night this week at seven.” Right, Harry remembers, looking to the desk and the angry Scottish witch. Minerva’s still here. She’s learning how much his children swear. “You can be sure that Professor Sinistra will hear how poorly you have represented Slytherin House.”

“Can’t wait,” is Albus’s parting line. The door slams shut behind him, hard.

Harry doesn’t wince. He smashed up this room, once. “The greenhouse is so that we can make homemade marmalade,” he tries to explain his daughter, looking at her in her neat Hogwarts robes, Gryffindor scrunchie in her hair, tiny earrings in her ears. He’s usually immune to the things his children say.

By his side, Ginny makes a noise as though he’s walked into a trap.

Lily keenly senses the kill. Her eyes narrow, fists clenched by her sides. “No one likes marmalade, _Dad_ –”

Harry balks at her tone. _I like marmalade,_ he thinks.

“– why would you ever…?”

“ _Lily_ ,” Ginny says harshly.

“That’s enough, Lily,” now James interrupts, sounding stern.

Lily looks at him.

“First period’s in five,” her brother says, still an authority, four years older than her. “You need your books.”

Lily’s spiteful expression whips between everyone taller than her, blanching white instead of pink. But then she’s going too. “ _Fine!_ ” she shouts, losing control, and it breaks Harry’s heart to see her crying again.

Finally, to follow his sister, James leaves with long strides across the room, revealing himself to be nothing but contemptuous, looking grown up in his robes. “You’re both crap,” is what he says, snorting and shaking his head. His voice has been deep for the past few years, and Harry doesn’t know anymore, what hurts the most. He clenches his jaw, and for a moment Ginny touches him gently on the arm.

“You need to give them time,” is all Minerva says, kindly, when it’s Harry and Ginny left in her office of warm wood and tartan. She barely seems to have aged since Harry was eighteen, smartly dressed in dark blue, steel-grey hair pulled off her face to under her hat.

He’s becoming himself, Harry remembers. He is what he’s become.

“I’m sorry about that,” he tells the closest thing he’s ever had to a grandmother, scratching at his short hair. “About the language. And I want you to be happy,” he tells Ginny, meeting her bright brown eyes. They’re slightly glassy with tears, though her jaw is still tight. “Happy with Neville, if he makes you happy,” he adds incoherently, letting himself notice how beautiful Ginny’s hair will always be, thick and not thinning at all, tied back.

“You’ve always been impressed by Mum’s jam,” Ginny tells him, smiling faintly, dressed in her black-and-white sports kit. “And I like this new shirt.” She pinches and wiggles the sleeve of it.

“I don’t know what a pikachu is,” Harry promises, glancing at their audience.

Minerva raises her hands, as though she’s equally nonplussed. She’s vanishing the plates down to the kitchens and the crumbs from her desk. Harry intends to leave her this jar of jam. He’s brought her some biscuits too.

Wryly, Ginny’s sighing, and Harry wonders if it was easy for her to run out of patience with him, in the end. She gestures with both hands in front of her. “Big yellow toy you bought Lily,” she says, “in Tokyo last year.” She’s explaining, Harry realises. “Part of that Pokémon game?”

James was obsessed with the Pokémon game, Harry remembers – with Percy’s kids. Teddy’d take them out with their phones and in the end Harry had to explain what trespassing meant.

He remembers Lily’s toy now, yellow with brown stripes and red cheeks, the size of Lily’s torso and head. “Oh right.” She loved it the moment she saw it, Harry could tell, and he’s never known how to tell her he loves her. She’ll have it up here in Hogwarts. It’s cute. A bit odd. Japan was their last and final family holiday, Harry supposes, and in a moment he wants to go back. “What’s that got to do with a shopping centre?”

Tiredly, Ginny’s laughing. “They’re waiting for you to tell them, I think,” is all she says before she leaves.

* * *

He’s received a parcel, Harry finds out, when he gets home from work to number 12, late that evening, closer to eight than seven o’clock. Hermione came to find him in her lunch hour, and he told her to come round with Ron so that he can feed them – give them their hamper, though he doesn’t mention this.

Apparently the weekend has been enough of a breather, because Ron’s already hanging out with Kreacher when Harry gets in. He taps a note on a coin with his wand, presumably to tell his wife that it’s time for her to finish.

Teddy’s right, Harry supposes for the first time, seeing this. They’ve been using phones for years through a dozen different proxies. Phones are better for many things; the wizarding world needs to accept that convergence with muggle technology has come.

He’ll buy a phone in the morning, Harry thinks.

“Bit of a shit greenhouse, mate,” Ron says once the coin’s gone away. He moves to stand outside, down the step from the conservatory so that he can nod down the garden, them both wearing robes. It’s dark, so the glass inside is reflecting, but the greenhouse glints when Harry leans out over the terrace, a lamp glowing on the back of the house.

“It’s not shit,” insists Harry, holding onto the conservatory door frame. It’s extremely wonky, the greenhouse, buttressed by a slide and some swings. It’s still standing and it rained last night. “It’s my pride and joy.”

“It’s as bad as my pumpkin patch,” Ron insists, as though this has been entertaining him for an hour. “Though don’t you dare tell Hermione I admitted…”

He makes Harry laugh and they’re grinning at each other. They return inside to a structure which was built properly by someone with the appropriate qualifications and Ron sets the garden door ajar instead of closing it, lashing it that way with a spell. The air’s cold like rain and the wind isn’t silent, but it’s nice to breathe fresh air, Harry’s agreed, even in November.

Finding a glass of red wine already poured for him on the table, Harry scratches up his hair – there’s been drizzle. Sometimes he misses having longer hair, though he's never let it get as long as it was at the end of the war, even during lockdown. It’s quicker in the morning like this. “I want to make my own marmalade!” he protests, wanting to get changed. “You can’t grow oranges outside in this country.” He read that in his book.

Ron swallows, tipping his head. “Give it a few years,” he suggests with a grin.

“Oh, don’t…” Harry doesn’t want to think about it. He knows that he should.

“Well, you’ve got a present,” Ron says to this, nodding at the box which Kreacher has stowed by the side of the rattan settee.

Harry looks at the box. “Is this from you two?”

“It’s not from us,” Ron denies, drinking wine. He can’t help making a joke. “It’ll be a bomb.”

This makes Harry snort, because wizards took up that technology fifteen years ago. Ron’s the only one who jokes about it, after what happened. Harry casts a few spells and finds a note, no threat of curse-magic explosives.

“ _I have been informed that you intend to make marmalade,_ ” Harry reads, while Ron drinks his wine. “ _Perhaps you should enter the twenty-first century._ ”

Ron chokes, coughing or laughing.

“The twenty-first century?” Harry asks, looking down at the note again. The handwriting is standard wizarding quillscript, anonymous. There’s nothing on the back. “The fuck is that supposed to mean? Who the fuck sent this, the smug twat?”

“You said you’d made a friend,” Ron suggests, and Harry’s surprised to realise that he must have let this slip.

While the wind rushes outside, Harry heaves the parcel to the settee and pulls free the brown paper from the box. It seems to be a kit of everything he needs – the equipment from a wizarding supplier – to brew his own beer. There’s a book with instructions and recipes and principles. It doesn’t have a cutesy title; it’s called _Charms to Brew Beer._ The cover design is something muggle retro vintage, barely wizarding at all.

“Fuck, Malfoy’s right,” Ron observes, amused with his wine as Harry flicks through the book. The ribbon marks _Chapter 6: IPAs_ , a suggestion. “Much better than jam. Go forth,” he suggests. He and George brew all sorts of joke potions and fizzy drinks for Wheezes.

Harry looks out towards his greenhouse, which will likely have leaked in the rain. He’s still proud of it. He can only see his own reflection, the old skin of his face, the lightning scar always visible now his hair’s short, his hard eyes. The glasses he still wears. “I’ll brew fruit beer,” he decides, thinking of weekends in his Barbour and his ancient Gryffindor scarf. “Like a Benedictine monk.” He looks down at the book again and thinks that he’ll need a patch for wheat, maybe spelled in. “One day every part of it will have been grown in this garden.”

“It’s good to have a dream,” Ron suggests.

Later, after dinner, Harry explains this plan again.

“When are you going to have time to do that?” asks Hermione, looking full and flushed and happy from Kreacher’s steamed pudding. Teddy’s out. “Though it’s nice of Malfoy, really,” she’s saying mostly to Ron, “sending something through to cheer you up.”

“We don’t know for certain it’s from him,” Ron corrects her, now she’s here. _Steady on_. They seem to be having their own conversation.

Harry invites Ron and Hermione to stay at the end of the night, after quite a lot of wine. He doesn’t mean in his bed and they don’t take it that way, Harry’s certain, though he finds his heart pounding for no reason at all. They decline because their own house is only through the floo, and if they wanted it would only be a short trip on the Tube. It’s not late; they’d make it in time.

He’s just lonely, Harry thinks to himself, once they’ve gone. Kreacher’s gone to bed and Teddy’s still out. He’s lonely and desperate. He gave Ron and Hermione their hamper and they were embarrassed; it was all much too much. Harry told them he loved them and that he always would. Ron said that he didn’t need to prove that; they knew. Hermione was crying from the booze.

Lonely and desperate, Harry takes off his wedding ring as he gets into bed. He puts it away in a box and tucks the box in his drawer, the same place where Ginny’s engagement ring once hid. He’ll have to find somewhere better at the weekend; his vault if the goblins are in a mood to serve him. He thinks about his own hypocrisy, all the promises he once made.

He thinks about Malfoy, no longer stiff and high-collared but languid, exposed, lying in bed with a man.

Eventually, before he goes to sleep, still drunk, Harry acknowledges that he can’t feel his right leg. He reaches down and it’s like feeling up someone else, the skin nothing but scar between his hip and his knee. Lower than that is a magical reconstruction, not the foot or the shin or the calf he was born with. They’re gone, the way that Alastor Moody’s were gone by the time Harry knew him. It was a cardboard box that did for Harry – a box that blew up – and it wasn’t meant for him; he just found it. He goes looking for things for a living, and he’s good at it – he’s not dead, when someone else might have been. One day he might find something that does for an eye.

It’s the topography of the Brecon Beacons, Harry’s scar, the healers in St Mungo’s said. Lying in bed, Harry imagines himself without it, young and beautiful, someone beautiful climbing in to sleep by his side.


	4. November, December

The kids don’t come home for Christmas.

They don’t tell Harry. They fob him off for the rest of November, and he’s stupid enough to think that they’re cooling down. The day after term ends, when they’re due to come home, he finds himself stood up on the King’s Cross platform, waiting with Ron. Hermione’s at work, like Harry should be; he left on time to be here for this.

Harry’s well aware that like everything kids do, standing him up is a test of who’s in charge just as much as it’s a statement of their feelings, just as much as it’s a test of their own nerve and daring – or cunning and ambition, depending. But it still hurts, just as badly as having no one to meet him on the platform when he was young, maybe worse.

As an auror, his mind ticks easily through the logistics: Hogwarts permission slips are enchanted, and there are forgery-detecting spells which any sensible authority would use in a case like this. Direct fraud seems unlikely, even vanishingly so. There will have been a conspiracy – between the children, absolutely, who will have needed Ginny’s signature, unless they found a way to Harry’s, and someone to receive it. Permission slips are usually a matter for each student’s head of house.

The question is whether Ginny and Neville and Aurora Sinistra were hoodwinked, if they didn’t think it mattered, or if they didn’t in fact care that Harry was going to be left here, now, malingering on Platform 9¾ with all the other children off the train and most of them gone with their families. He’s embarrassed. The mums and dads have been looking at him in his Barbour and his hat, standing alone, whispering questions, _Is that Harry Potter? Did you hear…?_

Rose and Hugo have been and gone with Ron. Harry didn’t think to ask if the others were behind them, because the five kids all have their own friends and never sit together. The Granger-Weasleys are fourteen and twelve; they’ll have assumed that Uncle Harry had a reason for waiting on the platform with their dad like a mug.

The message is more than clear enough. _What goes around comes around; conceal things from us and we’ll conceal things from you. D’you remember that time when you stood us up?_ He sends owls when he gets home, to make sure that the kids are in school and not in a caravan somewhere off the M6 – but not with any urgency. He doesn’t know how to discipline them for stuff like this.

 _Did Scorpius stay in the castle?_ Harry writes to Malfoy, because they’ve been sending the odd note back and forth – the first was when Harry said thanks for his beer kit. _HP,_ he adds at the end.

Malfoy seemed to enjoy being recognised as the anonymous sender. _I have just now been informed: your three have remained for the holidays and not caught the train. They are getting cold feet. I did not know._

 _Thx. Bit late for cold feet. I’ve written to McG. They’ll be getting a bollocking from her if no one else. I’ve said that they can stay, so that’s my parental authority fucked._ He should have gone up to Hogsmeade and hauled them bodily through the floo. _HP_

Sensibly, in Harry’s opinion, Malfoy doesn’t respond to this. _Have you made any beer yet?_ he demands instead.

 _My godson’s decided that we’re cracking the first bottles next Saturday. Feel like poisoning yourself?_ he writes before thinking. All-wizarding households are allowed to mix indoors, but the Ministry has been telling employees that they should show solidarity. _We’ll be cooking as well, so it’s a night of entertainment. HP_

He expects a short reply, but he gets a little more. _Your godson Edward Jeremiah Lupin Mountbatten III, the communist? My aunt’s grandson? Tell him I’ll be there and that I expect him to be appropriately attired for an evening occasion._

For the first time in twenty-two years, now, Harry acknowledges what he must have always known somewhere in his head, that Teddy and Malfoy are related. This’ll be worse for Teddy’s image of his family than his grandmother, Harry thinks. And his real middle name is Hope.

“Merlin,” Teddy Hope Lupin duly complains when Harry informs him about their guest. “What’d you invite him for?”

He looks down at his outfit, which shows off rather a lot of his chest and the edge of a stringy tattoo, written rather than drawn. It’s his mum’s handwriting, Harry’s been told, copied by an artist who can do these things. He has several, of his dad’s handwriting as well, but he refuses to tell anyone what they say. Harry supposes that Petra and maybe Victoire will have had the chance to read them, but Harry doesn’t like to think about that.

“D’you think that Uncle Ron will let me borrow a proper shirt?” Teddy goes on, because he and Ron are about the same build, though Teddy in no way has a paunch.

“You wear proper shirts for Malfoy?” Harry asks rhetorically, surprised. He’s never worn one for Andromeda.

“It’s not worth it, Dad,” Teddy tells him, trauma in his eyes.

* * *

On Friday night the next week, Harry decides to go out. He’s eating a marmalade sandwich with a shop-bought beer after work because he’s already eaten half a meal at the Ministry, and he thinks to himself that this is not how one finds a man for whispering in corners and doing things with cocks. He keeps thinking about Malfoy and Malfoy’s coming round tomorrow; Harry doesn’t want it to be weird. Teddy’s going out for Friday night, he’s been informed; he’s been upstairs since Harry came home, getting ready. There are reports that London might be moved into Tier 3.

Ron’s told Harry that he should be going out with George, if he wants to go out. “Angelina knows all the best places,” he’s said. “Always has done.” Harry never knew.

“You should come out with us,” George even insisted after Harry came out to him sometime in October, immediately accepting. George has no children by choice, though he’s been married to Angelina for as long as Harry’s been married to Ginny. Was married. “We’ve got something for everyone, our group. We’ll pick up a bloke for you to flirt with, no probs.”

They had a long chat about Harry’s marriage to Ginny, the key point of which being that it wasn’t a lie. And if it was, then it wasn’t for at least the first ten years.

They go out. The R number may not be down, but London is full of groups of six trawling the streets in different coloured Father Christmas hats, masks around their chins instead of beards. Fluffy masks. It’s likely unsafe, but they seem fatalistic. Also drunk, no matter that it’s early.

Katie Bell is bisexual, apparently, but not looking for now. George and Angelina have always had an agreement that their marriage isn’t sexually exclusive, but they don’t tell Harry what this means in practice, and he cannot imagine how it works. They seem happy. Lee Jordan brings his own group with him from the media – oddly dazzling when he arrives, not talking about his old tarantula.

Lee’s crowd includes two gay men, which starts the night well, but they’re a couple and not interested in flirting with Harry. They’ve lived completely different lives from him, also – no children – even if they’re both wizards and were only two years behind, one in Ravenclaw and one in Hufflepuff.

“You work for the Ministry?” they ask him, bemused.

“Are we sure that this is legal?” Harry asks, when someone suggests they head out of the wizarding part of the city.

By the end of the night, Harry’s hollow from drink, feeling cold because they’re sitting outside and it’s perishing even under the heat lamp. He’s hunched up in his Barbour – his Gryffindor scarf, which he conjured from home when the muggles they’ve picked up weren’t looking. He’s talking to a woman who identifies as a spinster – “You may or may not have heard of asexuality,” she says, though Harry has; he’s read a book; “but in any case, it’s difficult to identify with a negative claim, so this is what I’m going with for now…” She’s funny. Sarcastic. A bit defensive, but aren’t they all?

“You could call yourself a bachelorette,” Harry suggests, grinning though he's sure that their conversation’s illegal.

“That’s just another word for _slag_ ,” she waves him off. She seems to like complaining. It feels daring, to Harry.

They end up discussing the different types of beer that Harry wants to make; if the gin thing is over; whether it’s just growing up, or if it’s the nature of the past few years, the past fifteen, the past twenty, that all the dreams they once had seem irrelevant now.

“I dunno what we can do,” Harry tells her, drinking beer, trying out the different kinds. He’s never bothered thinking about it, but beer is a constant in his life. He’s profoundly grateful for its constancy. He plans to go home and make another load of beer before he goes to bed. 

“Wake up,” this woman suggests, whoever she is, smiling wryly as she cadges the open bottle of wine from further down the table.

* * *

Harry barely recognises Teddy in Ron’s shirt, the next day. Ron’s clearly in a joking mood, because it’s the same shirt that Harry tried to wear out in October.

It must be too small for Ron now, Harry decides, feeling better about stretching it before. It fits Teddy like a glove. He looks like a grown up, even with his piercings and his hair. He’s put a pink-and-yellow streak through the blue.

At the age of twenty-two and six months, Harry was married and trained as an auror, eighteen months away from holding a baby in his arms. He was sorted. He was living in his godfather’s house, the way that Teddy is – but his godfather was dead, the house was inherited, and he could have bought his own if he’d liked.

It’s selfish, Harry suspects, to have thrown away any part of that security when Teddy won’t even dream that it’s possible.

And Teddy can be a tad selfish sometimes himself, but Harry wants to forgive it, the way that he wants to be forgiven. Teddy’s only ever looking for the world to be better, and he doesn’t care if he can get ahead by luck or birth; he wants everyone else to have a way ahead too.

“Look at you,” Harry says, unsure how to express these thoughts.

“What?” Teddy asks him self-consciously, pulling at his cuffs, always wearing his anarchy ring.

“I’m a proud goddad,” Harry tells him with a grin.

Teddy gives him a look.

Malfoy arrives at the front door – as appropriate, Kreacher and Teddy both tell Harry, because he’s a new guest.

“Hello Malfoy,” Harry greets him casually, an uneducated oik. He’s always known how to wind Malfoy up. “Welcome to your ancestral home. It’s mine now.”

“Yes, yes,” Malfoy answers as though he expected this, meeting his eyes for a moment, looking better than Harry remembered. It must be the Christmas spirit. “I’ve been gathering the nightshade,” he says, not Christmassy, though Harry’s decorated for the children who aren’t here. He’s wearing grey and dark foresty brown. “All will return to me in time.”

When they arrive downstairs, Teddy’s chopping onions under Kreacher’s supervision. At the sight of them, Kreacher disapparates – _crack_ – and Teddy stands up straight, putting down the knife. It’s incongruous in Harry’s never fitted, slightly shabby kitchen, a massive wooden table at its heart. The walls are teal blue.

Malfoy grins at Teddy, and Harry’s not sure that he’s ever seen such love in his expression. He and Scorpius are both guarded when Harry sees them together.

That’s always been in public, Harry supposes. It’s strange to realise – he’s seeing Malfoy in private, maybe for the first time, maybe since sixth year, which isn’t what Harry wants to remember. He’s arrived with the aura of sex he brought to the quidditch match, and Harry notices that. Really, it’s cologne. He hasn’t brought a gift, clearly because he’s a prick.

“My Lord Mountbatten,” he’s saying, for some reason, and it’s clear that he doesn’t feel out of place. “Who let you out? You look like a fucking trollop.”

Teddy turns pinker than the streak in his hair. “Hello Cousin Draco,” he says, long-suffering, nonetheless failing to contain an oddly pleased, embarrassed grin as they greet each other with a hug. Malfoy pats Teddy on the back as though he remembers, like Harry, when Teddy wasn’t this tall.

It gives Harry a jolt, ever so slightly. No one greets each other with hugs anymore.

“We’re having curry,” Harry points out. He feels like a guest in his own house, like he’s the inappropriate one.

Malfoy nods, as though this is an acceptable offering at his altar. His arm stays around Teddy’s shoulders before he lets him go. “Yes, but you promised me beer,” he tells Harry, with an insincere frown.

The beer’s not very good, Harry’s mortified to find out. It’s acrid and bitter. They keep going for a quarter of their bottles, before Kreacher can’t take their displeasure any longer and transfigures what they’re drinking to butterbeer from wherever he’s hiding out of sight.

“Oh,” Harry says, looking down as the bubbles pop. He scowls up at the ceiling and hopes that Kreacher can see it; he should be with them or taking the night off. “Was it that bad?” he asks his guests.

They’re both drinking butterbeer politely.

“I’ll open another round, just in case,” Harry suggests, heading to the hatch in the corner and tromping down the narrow stairs to the cellar.

The next bottle Harry tries in the thin dark downstairs is just as bad, unsurprisingly. Harry looks at the crates of it, the waste, the fermenting batch which might well be the same; he was drunk when he made it – but then Kreacher’s popping all the bottles into butterbeer and rainbow fizz, different drinks which Harry recognises as Kreacher’s own inventions, the children’s favourites and Ginny’s and his own.

They’ve always impressed him, Kreacher’s homemade drinks.

“It’s only a first attempt,” Harry apologises as he climbs out of the cellar with a bottle of wine –

– but Teddy cuts over him, casting a spell on his butterbeer to make it foam. Something from Hufflepuff, Harry imagines. “No one’s dead, Dad,” he says, drinking from his bottle with enthusiasm now. “Stop worrying.”

Malfoy snorts, sipping compulsively and making a face to find something sweet – putting down his butterbeer and gesturing for Harry to give him the wine, as though Harry’s a troublesome waiter. “Poor Potter,” he observes to Teddy, his cousin, taking the wine without saying thanks, squeezing and tapping the neck with his thumb so the foil’s off and the cork’s coming out, as if by magic with a gentle _pop_. “He’s always struggled with the learning curve.” The foil and cork vanish into rippling fingers.

“I’ll do better next time,” Harry promises, heading to get glasses.

The curry’s much better, and conversation flows easily between Teddy and Malfoy, though it’s mostly Teddy getting het up. Harry listens, feeling like he’s watching modernity. The political repartee is too quick and wordy for him.

At about half-past-nine, Teddy says he’s going out.

“Out now?” Harry reacts before thinking, looking at his watch. “You went out yesterday.” Harry’s still a bit hungover.

“Yes, Dad,” Teddy says with forbearance, lingering at the bottom of the basement stairs. “I’m a creature of the night.”

When he’s gone, Harry looks at Malfoy.

“He’s mixed-species,” Malfoy explains, relaxing here in Harry’s downstairs kitchen. “Half werewolf,” he glosses at the confusion on Harry’s face. “He’s proud of it. As his grandmother says,” he goes on, an odd sort of pride or respect in his voice, “he’s the only one who makes himself these obstacles. Though I’m sure his friends are jealous of the increased immune response…”

He sounds like he can see both sides; Harry finds them confusing, even as Malfoy explains.

“He refuses to profit from the fact that his father is dead,” he continues, bluntly explaining, something like a joke in his tone. “If the man were alive, Teddy would have grown up with remarks and more severe discrimination; he demands to suffer still. Have you never spoken about it?”

Harry shakes his head.

“You should ask him,” Malfoy suggests, almost exactly Harry’s age with his hair going thin at the crown. His widow’s peak is sharp and angular, but it suits him somehow; he looks good. He looks comfortable in his sharp face, the high collar of his brown jumper, expensive and soft rather than stiff. “Ask why he hates our world so much. It’s always personal, the political.” He says this as though it’s a joke which Harry should get.

“OK,” Harry agrees, his own hair a little receding but mostly just going grey. Cut short.

Malfoy snorts at the look on his face. It’s easy for Harry to forget, in this moment, how much they hated each other in school.

And it’s still early, they’ve been told by Harry’s godson, so Harry suggests that they open another bottle of wine. There are sconces on the wall, full of soft light, while the house is empty and huge around their quiet voices.

They end up on Malfoy’s marriage to Astoria, again, which really means that they end up on sex. “It was barely a secret, my sexuality,” Malfoy explains, drawling and laconic. “I couldn’t get it up. We would lie there in bed and she might as well have been made of balloons, or fired off in a kiln.” His energy is entirely sex, talking about his own impotence. He’s slouching languidly into the table.

Harry’s had quite a lot of wine by this point, and two of Kreacher’s drinks that he knew when he picked them were alcopops. “Couldn’t you just…” He screws up his nose, making a vague wanking gesture in the air.

Malfoy sighs, his jaw cut like glass, lines at his eyes – humour in his expression, to watch Harry’s hand. “I was leaving adolescence and well into adulthood,” he complains, as though he doesn’t understand, after all these years, why the facts are so difficult for Harry or anyone else who’s heard the story to accept. “I didn’t want to fuck her!” He laughs, and Harry’s laughing too. “There was only so much we could do,” he concludes.

“So how was baby Scorpius conceived?” Harry asks, drinking deep purple fizz. It takes like plums.

Malfoy’s pale eyes meet his. “Potions,” he says with a smirk, and it’s clear that he means nothing legitimate. “I dosed myself on the Amortentia, and in exchange Astoria took the Polyjuice. We made a dirty weekend of it. The idea was to include the exchange in our sex life more generally…”

A little slow on the uptake, Harry snorts as this sinks in, surprised. He imagines Malfoy wilfully downing a love potion; he imagines Astoria, whose severe and proper demeanour he can vaguely recall… “Who did she polyjuice into?” he asks.

“Ah,” Malfoy doesn’t answer, still looking at him. He quirks his eyebrows and picks up his wine, smug.

“You did not fuck yourself,” Harry says, because he cannot believe it, though he can see in this basement why someone would think Malfoy fuckable. It’s not a thought he could say that he’s ever had before.

Malfoy splutters, the most undignified sound coming out of him. He covers his mouth with his sleeve and goes red, laughing. He’s turning away and then he’s shaking his hand, which is wet. “No, I did not fuck myself!” he declares, his face ablaze with laughter, his eyes bright and startling on Harry’s, his wine down and his wand moving to clean. “What in Salazar’s name do you take me for, for fuck’s sake? I’m not that much of a fucking –”

“I don’t know!” Harry matches his tone. “You convinced your wife to –”

“There are limits!” Malfoy insists, spilt wine vanishing like something obscene. “ _Fuck myself,_ ” he carries on under his breath, his eyes meeting Harry’s, as though he’s now thinking it through. “Honestly, Potter…”

“Well, who was it, then?” Harry insists, feeling like he’s given something away.

“No one, really,” Malfoy says, glancing down. “There was no fucking.” He frowns, talking quickly. “You’ll have to forgive me and I apologise unreservedly…” He glances up before looking away. “I wouldn’t do it now. It was a long time ago.”

Harry shrugs, gesturing his question mark, waiting. Drinking purple fizz.

Malfoy ducks his head for a moment, acknowledging. “It’s possible that we turned her into you,” he says dryly, meeting Harry’s eyes.

It takes uncountable seconds for Harry to make sense of this. His brain stops short, mostly from the image… “But…” he ever fails to begin. _Why?_ is what he’s thinking. Malfoy’s looking at him, pouring himself a fuller glass of wine, topping up Harry’s, which Harry isn’t drinking. His neutral expression of disgust is set in a more severe frown. “How…?” None of this makes sense. “I’m very careful about Polyjuice!” Harry finally lands on.

His tone makes no suggestion that he’s angry or upset, at least not with Malfoy, and Harry finds that he isn’t angry or upset, though he knows that he should be. He’s annoyed with himself, but otherwise his feelings resemble bright frothy bubbles, which he thinks might be shock or confusion. There’s a joke in this somewhere; he feels jumpy.

Not missing a beat, as though the worry in his expression was entirely a lie – because it’s turning into something more satisfied, gleaming, a strain of disbelief – Malfoy immediately retorts, grinning broadly, “Not careful enough!” He picks up his wine again as though he’s won and looks entirely pleased with himself.

It’s as though Harry’s passed a test. He cannot believe he’s passed a test. He –

“Astoria found out your shifts and called up the Office,” Malfoy confesses – lurching into this story as though narrating a schoolboy jape. Harry’s not sure what the rules are and if he needs to report this. “Suspected burglary,” Malfoy laments like a snob, shrugging as though there was nothing that could have been done. “We have so many possessions; it’s difficult to tell… You came to our house and she offered to take your cloak.”

Harry doesn’t remember visiting the Malfoys’ house, fifteen years ago. “We’re not allowed to let people take our cloaks,” he says stupidly now, leaning away from the table, precarious and making the bench chink on the flagstones when he sits forward again. “Because of Polyjuice!” he accuses.

“You should have been much ruder to her,” Malfoy agrees, unrepentant and wicked in Harry’s huge, empty house. “You let her touch your shoulders and she found herself a hair.”

Harry’s not sure what to say to this. Kingsley always said that it’d be better to keep his hair short.

Malfoy’s grinning again. “I don’t remember much of it,” he promises, again. “The Amortentia gave us Scorpius, but it was clear that one time was enough. Astoria didn’t like it,” he falls short of fully explaining. “I couldn’t get it up even when she –” He waves a hand, ducking his head. If he could see through the table, he’d be looking towards Harry’s trousers.

In Harry’s head, the lighting was soft and there were sheets. “You’ve seen – ?” The sheets draw away and between them there’s –

“I’m not sure that it will have looked like yours,” Malfoy tells him, frowning as though he regrets it, wrinkling his nose. “The body in the bed looked like Astoria. Granted, she had a cock and an impressive set of bollocks, your old hair and green eyes – you have terrible eyesight, she said.” He’s meeting Harry’s terrible eyes. “But beyond that… It’s difficult to explain.” He moves past this quickly, but Harry’s rather stuck on each single word, not least hearing _impressive_. “We get on much better now. She’s a lovely woman,” Malfoy finishes, frowning off towards the downstairs corner. He sounds as though he’s describing a wallpaper pattern. “Nothing about her’s my type.”

He looks at Harry with a comical frown.

“She’s very well put together,” he complains, some sort of joke in his eyes. “Never a hair out of place.”

 _Well,_ is all that Harry can think. _Well, well, well._

They talk about something boring after this.

* * *

“It was a bit overwhelming,” Harry explains to Ron and Hermione, filling up their glasses and his own in their kitchen.

It’s Boxing Day and Harry’s spent the past forty-eight hours mediating between Teddy and Andromeda. It’s getting easier, sort of. No one called anyone racist. Apparently Teddy spent ten days of November dutifully in quarantine, because one of his mates had a positive test, and Harry really should have noticed.

As it is, Harry’s been more focused on Malfoy. He’s been sitting on the Polyjuice revelation for two weeks. “I mean, all right, Malfoy’s gay. Fine.” He’s come to terms with this now. He’s had to share the information so the story makes sense; he doesn’t think that Malfoy would care if Ron gossiped. “I mean, it tracks out.”

“Does it?” asks Ron, bemused, picking up his wine, about where Harry was two months ago, he suspects. 

It’s obvious when Hermione kicks her husband in the shin. They’re inside, in the kitchen; Rose and Hugo are watching TV in the other room, faint noise filtering through the house.

“Or – yeah, yeah, of course?” Ron suggests, looking between them. He scratches at the freckles on his long nose, uncomfortable. “Knew it all along? No way was he ever sleeping with that Pansy Parkinson…”

Laboriously, looking to the ceiling, ever failing not to smirk, Hermione sighs. “Keep telling us about your evening, Harry,” she suggests, her eyes glinting with a joke Harry doesn’t understand.

“Yeah, right,” Harry continues, sharing a confused shrug with Ron, sipping his red wine and it’s nice, hard and deep. “So Malfoy’s gay. Fine. Would’ve been weird for him to come out in the nineties when we were all teenagers, maybe, but it’s 2020, innit? It’d be weird for him to stay in.”

Hermione quirks an eyebrow.

“Or – not?” he corrects himself, feeling as lost as Ron looks. “Anyway. Malfoy’s gay. Done.” He shakes his head and carries on. “He and his wife were into kinky potions chemsex…”

“It’s on the edge of legality, but as long as all parties consent –” Hermione begins, her eyes widening accusingly over the table. Her and Ron’s kitchen is shabby chic more than shabby, in cream and duck-egg blue. The worktops are white stone; number 12 has wood.

“Well, _I_ didn’t bloody consent!” Harry complains, even as he finds yet again that he doesn’t really mind, his chest too full of bubbling pops. Malfoy said that he wouldn’t do it now. For some reason Harry believes him. “But that isn’t the point,” he barrels on as Hermione moves her mouth to speak. Ron waves at her soothingly, and Harry knows that they live in a post Me Too world, but these were his bollocks and, “The point is –”

And now Harry pauses, because this feels momentous.

“At the age of twenty-five,” Harry explains, trying to give this point the gravitas it deserves, “Draco Malfoy found me sexually attractive.” He gestures, putting down his wine. “I helped him conceive his son.”

For a moment, no one says anything, and Harry thinks that he’s made his point, nodding and picking up his wine for a swallow. There’s the sound of the dishwasher, which is supposedly more water-efficient than spelling the crockery to scrub. The TV’s quiet, away in the other room.

At the age of twenty-five, Harry would not have been proud that Draco Malfoy found him sexually attractive. At the age of twenty-five, random witches were sending Harry their knickers through the post, which made Hermione despair. They went straight in the wash, and then Ginny used to wear them, if they fit, insisting that lacy knickers were expensive.

At the age of forty, Harry hasn’t received a pair of knickers in years. He has a feeling that it’s changed his attitude to sex absolutely, maybe not for the better.

Interrupting Harry’s thoughts about Malfoy and knickers and the fact that it might feel like a power trip, now, the idea of someone wanting him instead of their wife, Hermione scoffs, here in her and Ron’s serene kitchen. “Conceive his son?” she complains, playfully accusing, dragging Harry back to reality. “You ended their marriage! I don’t know _how_ she stayed with him after that.”

Indignant, Ron defends Harry before Harry can defend himself. “Malfoy couldn’t get it up; she’s the one who drank his hair!” They’re all laughing, though Harry might be forcing the sound. “I’m dead proud of you, mate,” Ron goes on, straight-faced, patting Harry patronisingly on the upper arm.

Harry’s not sure if this is better. “It’s important!” he complains, trying to get them back on track, trying not to say it so loudly that Rose and Hugo overhear. “A gay man fancied me.”

“Oh, is this what we’re saying?” asks Hermione, as though to herself. “The indefinite article.”

“All the gay men fancy you,” Ron corrects supportively. His grammar’s improved over the years.

“It’s a confidence boost,” Harry insists.

Ron’s façade seems to falter, his expression turning sceptical. “It’s Draco Malfoy,” he reminds him, saying what Harry’s refusing to think about.

“He said that we should go out,” Harry informs them. Repeating the words, he realises how they sound. “Not like that,” he corrects, because he’s sure.

Even as he says this, however, Ron and Hermione are looking at each other. Ron’s pulling a face and Hermione’s offering an opaque little shrug.

Harry loves their little gestures; the way that they talk to each other –

“I’m going to woo him,” Harry decides, in a moment, promptly knocking over his wine. The glass smashes, rolling off the table, but Harry knows that he needn’t apologise; he ducks to clear it up. “He’ll fancy me again.”

“ _Again?_ ” Ron repeats, as though he hasn’t caught Harry’s gist. Eyes wide, he’s giving Hermione a look as Harry puts his wand away, glass repaired, resettling into his chair. It’s as though he thought that they were in a different conversation.

Hermione is covering her mouth with her hands as though she’s holding something in. When Harry looks at her, she’s shaking her head, before she visibly cracks up.

“What?” Harry asks Ron.

Ron opens his mouth –

– but before Ron can speak, Hermione lets out a snort and she’s forcing her mouth closed against titters, her eyes closed and her face increasingly pink as though she can’t get enough air. “Oh,” she sucks in breath, one hand in a fist, water in her eyes. “Oh Harry, please, _please_ never change,” is all she says.

“ _What?_ ” demands Harry, indignant. It’s going to be difficult, this plan, he’s aware. He’s only slept with one person in his life and he’s no longer a catch. Also, “I know that it’s Malfoy, but he…” It’s not clear that there are any other options, for now. Harry’s not looking for anything serious.

With another loud snort, Hermione’s laughing at him, waving her hands as though she can’t take it.

Ron’s leaning towards him, pink but more in control. “We were having a round of kinky chemsex before you arrived,” he excuses his wife, sniggering, and Harry thinks that he must be joking. “I’m sure that you can resurrect your old appeal,” he manages to tell Harry, as though the joke is on him. “You’ll need to woo him,” Ron suggests, very seriously. “Like you said.”

This sets off Hermione entirely.

Rose appears at this point with a plate on which there were once mince pies. “What have you done to Mum?” she asks Harry and Ron, much too cool for fourteen.

“Ignore them,” Ron suggests, as Harry’s nonplussed. Another wheeze, and Hermione’s buried herself in her arms on the table, keening, a creature made only of hair. Ron raises his chin to sort out his daughter, patting heavy curls consolingly. “You two all right?”


	5. December, January

There are no fixed plans for Harry and Malfoy to go out. They’ve exchanged a few owls since they met up, but when Harry sends a note after coming back to the house from Ron and Hermione’s, he gets no response. He sends another, but the pattern repeats.

By the new year, Harry’s feeling deflated and confused. Then Kreacher informs him that a presumptuous elf – “Very young, Master Harry; inexperienced; not knowing the etiquettes, not like Kreacher; disgraceful,” – has requested that he stop sending letters because her master is away and Master Harry’s owl has taken to nipping.

Taking this on the chin, just about, and sending through an apology when Kreacher isn’t looking, Harry goes up to Hogsmeade in the new year, where he feels certain that his children have spent Christmas with Ginny, though she promises that they ate in the castle and she only saw them for the same amount of time that Harry saw Ron and Hermione. The Magpies had a match on Boxing Day.

“Do you really think I’m that much of a shit?” Ginny demands in the slush on the road, her brown eyes bright, her mittened fists on her hips pulling in her elegant cloak. It’s rich white and it used to suit her even better when they were out in proper snow. The children have just gone inside the gates. “That I’d conspire to do it all without you?”

“I don’t know anything, Gin,” Harry tells her, bitter, frustrated that this visit’s been so short. He can see his children talking together, walking away, James pulling Lily to his side and Albus walking separately.

“Harry,” Ginny tells him, frustrated with something she also doesn’t voice. “I don’t know what’s got into you –”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Harry tells her, meeting her assessing brown eyes. “Maybe it’s wanting to spend Christmas with my children.”

“You’ve missed Christmas three years in a row,” Ginny tells him on this bright winter day, and she doesn’t even seem to regret it. Her mouth is set hard. “I don’t know how many times before that.”

Harry glares at her. Bringing it up feels unfair, though the facts are true enough. Through either coincidence or planning, he wasn’t needed this year. Harry thinks it ironic that now is when the higher ups have decided to afford him a family life.

When he gets back to London, Harry forgets that he’s been asked to stop writing to Malfoy.

 _You said that we’d go out,_ he writes bluntly, passive-aggressively, sitting in the deep teal basement of his house. There are high windows to the street where the owls fly in. _When are we going out?_ He’s writing on the table he and Malfoy were sat at, before. _HP,_ he signs off, as though writing a memo at work.

Early the next morning, when he’s cooled down, Harry’s surprised to receive a reply.

 _We’ll go out whenever you like, HP,_ says Malfoy’s note, easy. _Where are you taking me?_

Harry doesn’t know how to interpret this.

He’s solicitous when he’s trying to please someone, Harry knows, even after the cack-handed stage. It never quite went in, but Ginny used to tell him that he didn’t need to fuss. She’d say it laughing, not like when she broke up with Dean, when Harry was lucky: she’s in professional sport; she flies brooms; she can balance bulky things and climb over physical obstacles; just because they’ve put the bill in front of Harry doesn’t mean that he should pay – he should check the receipt; make sure that there hasn’t been a mistake; make use of the joint account.

It’s Harry’s guilty pleasure, throwing money at a problem to make it go away. He likes taking someone out (Ginny) and pretending that he’s in another time, a timeless time, with him and whoever’s with him two timeless characters in a play. It feels like magic, and it doesn’t matter how much he knows that his thoughtless spending is foolish, that binary gender norms are toxic, that these are traps into which unhappy, poor kids fall when they grow up.

He likes to spoil the children to make their faces light up brightly, fill glasses of water and wine so that no one goes without. It used to nag at him when Ginny didn’t (wouldn’t) drink something that he poured for her. She used to say that he couldn’t expect her to drink a glass of water if she wasn’t feeling thirsty. He thought that she was being reactionary, because loading plates with unsolicited food is something that her mother still does. They didn’t row about it; they used to call each other daft.

“You and Mum both like being in control,” Ginny told him bluntly, once in lockdown, when they were lying together in bed. “I don’t like being controlled.”

They had to talk about this, inevitably. The counsellor asked questions. Harry was encouraged to accept that he’s only ever trying to fulfil his family’s needs. Ginny didn’t get it, they found out, because for her what Harry would provide has always been bound up with feelings of shame and duty and discretion, nothing fun. She was never allowed to ignore what things cost. Harry didn’t get why Ginny valued recognition, attention, the chance to express her own views – because with eighteen years spent in search of food and shelter, his priorities have always been different. He really has never given a fuck.

He’s internalised that love is conditional, which is why he tries to make people proud. He doesn’t say _I love you_ if he can avoid it, because his words have been rarely believed.

Becoming himself, Harry decides, he’s going to let himself fuss. He’ll practise fussing, until he’s worked out how to do it so it feels caring, the way it feels to him. Malfoy might find it attractive; he always seemed to like being spoiled. Harry’ll draw the line at fawning like Pansy Parkinson in school, but otherwise he will use the instincts he has. And try not to spend too much money. He’s not sure what he’ll do about the gender norms – the counsellor observed gently that it would always be a losing game, wouldn’t it, to try and make his dead parents proud?

He puts the plan into action when he and Malfoy go out to the pub, which has table service for now, and Harry pays the bill. Malfoy doesn’t tell him where he went for Christmas, and as an auror Harry finds this suspicious – but the more they talk, Harry realises that Malfoy can’t be a man of leisure like he thought. The adventures he relates with his parents and Scorpius and his old bosom buddies from school are too short, too contained; he must have a job, and this is what he isn’t talking about.

Pansy Parkinson married Blaise Zabini, Harry learns. She always fancied Blaise, even when she was fawning over Malfoy; Slytherin House is about games within games within games. Their children are seven and nine. Pansy and Blaise both play away from time to time; it’s never serious; it’s not supposed to happen; Malfoy’s learned not to take sides. Pansy drinks a lot and Blaise is keen on his horses.

“For riding?” Harry asks, a bit slow, drinking his pint.

“Well, that too,” Malfoy allows him, acknowledging. “He likes _gambling_ ,” he drawls, meeting Harry’s eyes as though introducing him to vice.

“Oh,” Harry says. He’s long been bad with money, but he’s never done anything like that.

Arms and then wrists on the table, Malfoy stretches, looking away. “Blaise and I were never close in school,” he admits, as though they hated each other with venom. “But I like him for Pansy; he’s as frivolous as her.” He finishes wickedly, eyes gleaming, “They summer in Italy, which means a lot of swimming and the opportunity to perv.”

Harry wonders if Malfoy means that he sleeps with him. “What’d you do last year?”

Malfoy’s nose wrinkles, when he’s faced with reality. “Last year I didn’t go.”

Whatever the look is on Harry’s face – he’s thinking, _Well, there you are_ – it makes Malfoy laugh, and that’s a nice feeling; Harry enjoys it.

The pub they’re in is still decorated for Christmas, just a bit, glinting and warm with an icy breeze to cut through the fug. “Goyle –” Malfoy starts next, recovered.

“You still call him Goyle?” Harry interrupts.

“Of course I call him Goyle,” says Malfoy, affronted. “That’s his name.”

“OK,” Harry doesn’t accept, drinking his pint.

Malfoy looks at him as though he’s strange. “Well, he married Hannah Abbott if you can believe it,” he says, nearly finished with his second. “She’s been Hannah Goyle for years and the kids aren’t even fat.”

This is when Harry embarrasses himself, because at Hannah Abbott’s name he asks, “Who?”

Malfoy shakes his head in disbelief, a suppressed laugh all in his teeth. The pub is fairly loud, the music upbeat, but Harry still hears him titter. “One of yours,” he insists, as though explaining a joke. _Keep up._ “Hufflepuff. Good friends with Susan Bones.”

“Oh yeah,” Harry says, remembering. Susan Bones is a lawyer with the Ministry Prosecution Service. They liaise a few times a year. “I know Susan,” he accepts.

“Well, you don’t know that she’s gay,” Malfoy says, eating one of Harry’s leftover chips. This is a joke, though the fact of it might be true. Half the world’s gay, Harry’s slowly finding out. Malfoy found out in December that Hermione – _Potter, that’s your best friend_ – identifies as bi and called him a fucking embarrassment.

“I don’t care about other people’s sexuality!” insists Harry. This is a position he’s taken.

Malfoy looks at him, his eyes a gleaming silver-grey. They’re tucked away in the corner of this pub, the sash window beside them cracked to let in the cold. “Do you not?” he asks simply, and Harry feels caught in a trap.

“What d’you want for pudding?” Harry changes the subject, craning his neck to read the menu written up on the wall, scratching at his hair. “Let’s get pudding.” There was no plan to come out for food.

“Let’s share,” Malfoy suggests, still looking at him, and it feels impossibly reckless when Harry asks the waiter for two spoons.

Things seem to dial down from this as January continues. There’s an illegal potions case at work, which keeps Harry busy and distracted. It’s tied up with something international and techy, which is why it ends up on his desk. It’s odd, Harry thinks, that he knows so much about coding and computers, because he’s not sure that he would know where to click if he was presented with one. He makes suggestions in meetings with the muggle representatives and the unspeakable liaison, and they seem to go down well.

Really, Harry’s not senior enough for these meetings – not quite – but the muggles have started requesting him. Of his rank and above he’s the only non-pureblood in the Office. Alleridge, the current Head Auror, refers to the Tube as the Choo.

Malfoy also seems busy throughout January – distracted too, no matter how much he tries to talk of frivolous things. He complains a lot, but Harry lets him, drifting away sometimes to think about the resources they need to better find the heart of the network they’re cracking.

It’s convenient, their rhythms shifting at the same time.

They keep meeting up, when they’re free; it’s something to do, Harry finds. He stops asking Malfoy if he’d like another drink, whenever their glasses are nearing dry. The interruption seems unnecessary; often he’s lost in his head – and sometimes Harry remembers that he’s trying to woo him, so he’ll smile at him when there’s a pause. It’s a bit awkward. He gets in crisps and portions of chips, when he’s hungry or Malfoy seems so.

He starts booking tables for restaurants. He does it fairly randomly – he has a phone now, and there’s internet in number 12. He only tells Malfoy when he’s shown up where they’re drinking and it’s time for them to leave, sometimes before they walk through the door.

A couple of times, Malfoy can’t make it, and Harry has nothing to do, so he goes and eats on his own.

Once, Harry can’t make it, so he owls through the details and tells Malfoy that he needs to find a date. The restaurant sends Harry the bill.

It doesn’t feel like he’s being controlling, especially not when he’s paying for Malfoy’s solo night out, of all the presumptions. He nonetheless finds himself experiencing a certain vicarious or maybe masochistic pleasure, reading through and paying off what is only a modest single cover. Often, when they’re out, it feels like he has nothing to say.

“You did what?” Malfoy complains, after Harry complains about paying. “It was a joke!” he protests, in another of his tight roll-neck jumpers, dark and contrasting with his pale hair. “I’d already covered it – they should have told you…” His eyes flash and he clenches his jaw, as though he might know the value of money after all.

“OK,” Harry says, feeling like a mug.

Malfoy fumes for the rest of the meal they’re out for, shaking his head, and Harry doesn’t say much, which seems to wind him up even more. They’re the last ones in the restaurant, it’s so late. When the bill comes, Malfoy swipes it off the silver dish and pounces on the waiter, swooping from their seats to the till – he swears blind that they didn’t have starters until the bloke gets his manager, who takes off the shared plates and they’ve stolen very nearly twenty quid. Malfoy pays, but Harry doesn’t see how.

It happens in a rush. Harry’s frozen for some reason, while it’s happening, which isn’t like him.

“I don’t know why you did that,” Harry snaps in the street, humiliation bubbling out of him. “That poor bloke – you made him think he’d gone mad.”

“Yes, yes,” Malfoy says tiredly, as though the effort of being a manipulative, gaslighting bastard’s worn him out. As though this action has satisfied him in some way, and he doesn’t regret it. The London sky is gloaming above them, though they’re a long way into the night. Harry’s wearing his Barbour and hat and Malfoy is wearing his long coat. “The question is, why didn’t you stop me?” He widens his eyes with the question.

“I didn’t want to embarrass you,” Harry says without thinking, and Malfoy’s reaction is scoffing surprise. Harry looks down between them, not sure what he’s doing. Everyone in these places must assume they’re a household, him and Malfoy, Malfoy and him. “Could you not do it again?” he requests.

The only answer he gets is pair of rolled eyes. “I’m annoyed that those fuckers ripped you off,” comes a strange sort of admission, Malfoy’s expression like there’s been a bad smell. “You shouldn’t be embarrassed,” he says, despite contradicting this every time they talk.

“Well, I’m going back inside.” He can’t leave, Harry realises, now they’re standing in the cold. “I’ll fix it,” he says, meeting Malfoy’s eyes and wondering if this was a mistake. “You just go home.”

“You are fucking ridiculous,” Malfoy mutters before he whips in a spin into nothing, with no sound.

Harry tries to take some nights off from Malfoy, after this, a little shaken up. But then he gets bored and feels lonely and regrets it. He doesn’t want to tell Ron and Hermione that it’s gone wrong.

 _BrewDog in 30?_ he suggests, the night he gives in. _HP_

The note is sent back with the _30?_ scribbled out, replaced with a sharply written _10._

Harry’s getting used to his phone, by this point. It’s easy to use, and much easier to understand than Perl and C. He finds himself annoyed by its clear limitations; it’s not really magic at all. With Malfoy he pretends that he’s had the phone for years, only fumbling to find the right app because he’s cack-handed, rather than a late-adopting wizard who prefers to use his wand.

Malfoy barely seems to notice the drinks and the chips and the dinner reservations, presumably because his needs were always met by others and he sees this as his right. Nothing happens again like the incident with the bill, but it’s expensive, taking Malfoy out two or three or somehow now five nights a week, this week, and Harry wonders if Malfoy’s waiting for him to crack.

And yet – Harry’s only ever earning more money, losing the hours in which he might spend it, so none of this is making a dent. He finds this out when he checks. He’s not sure why he feels guilty. It’s only when he comes home; when he’s out, he forgets.

The fifth night of the five-night week, Malfoy spots their empty glasses and Harry on his phone and he seems to have a crisis. Harry’s not sure why tonight, but it’s sweet, he’s terrified to find that he feels.

“I’ll get in these,” Malfoy’s promising. He looks awkward, and Harry’s not sure he owns a phone. “I’ll go to the bar and have someone come to the table.”

“It’s all right; I’ve done it now.” Harry tells him, playing innocent. He hasn’t done it yet.

“I’ll get the ones after,” insists Malfoy heroically, committing himself to at least another hour of Harry’s company. “You always get the bill; I’ll get it tonight; are we going elsewhere?”

“Yeah, yeah,” agrees Harry blandly, suppressing his grin and putting in the order. “I’m just texting Hermione.”

Twenty minutes later, Malfoy’s caught up in a rant, dotting crumbs of crisps with his finger, sucking it and doing impressions. It’s easy for Harry to duck his head and put in for two burgers on his phone. He’s used to living with an extrovert; he’s been nodding, “Hmm,” in all the right places.

“Carry on,” Harry tells him with a grin, as he puts the phone away.

Malfoy looks at him when the food arrives with two more beers, annoyed but not complaining, grey eyes dark as though he was trying – as though someone told him he should try. He picks up his pint and sighs. “Well, honestly, what they’re doing to the atrium is appalling,” he insists, tension relaxing from his shoulders. _Enough of that,_ he seems to say, and Harry knows it’s awful, but he agrees. “I will accept that the fountain needed to go – we’ve all accepted that now – but the replacement looks like something from a catalogue…”

Harry’s suspicious, that Malfoy would know what the new fountain looks like. He takes a bite of his burger with no idea what it cost – he was listening to Malfoy when he tapped the order in.

The Ministry has been in the process of replacing the Fountain of Magical Brethren for years, but the new installation was only unveiled this week. There was graffiti last summer, which finally pushed the change through. Teddy promises that he doesn’t know who did it; Harry’s at least certain that it couldn’t have been him, because he investigated. “I dunno,” Harry says, appreciating that he can make sense of this reference point. “I don’t think that something commemorative would have been right.”

The sides of Malfoy’s mouth are turned down. “Hm.” He drinks deeply, as though he’s deeply disappointed, woebegone. “They could have at least gone full Versace.”

“What’s that mean?” Harry finds himself laughing, the burger warm and smelling like comfort in his fingers. “You wanted more gold?” The atrium’s ceiling remains twinkling peacock blue.

Long-suffering, Malfoy makes a noise of lamentation, turning his head as though check their surroundings. “It means that the Ministry is oppressing me.” He looks back, sex and something dark in his eyes. “Fix it, Harry Potter,” he begs him.

Apparently this line’s become a joke.

“I can’t fix you being a cliché,” Harry tells him obtusely, smiling at the end of this line. He drops but also doesn’t drop his eyes.

“As my mother said to my father,” Malfoy agrees as Harry eats, and Harry never did realise how funny he is. He does an impression, tipping up his chin and straightening his back, and really, it’s uncanny. “ _Lucius, the girl has run off because our son is a deviant._ ” He’s waving a hand, fiddling with his burger to take out the salad and resettle the bun. “ _I am tired of repeating myself!_ ”

Grinning, Harry swallows. “They weren’t happy, I s’pose?” he enquires about the divorce. He sometimes (often) wonders what his parents Lily and James would think.

“I was disowned,” says Malfoy, flat.

And for a second –

He rolls his eyes, joking, and Harry titters from shock. “I’ve been paying Astoria’s maintenance from my personal funds,” he complains, as though this hardship is just as severe. “She does fuck all in Spain; it’s daylight robbery.”

“You shouldn’t have cheated on her so much,” Harry suggests, because he’s heard the full story now.

He and Ginny are going with separation for two years, so that neither of them has to plead the other’s unreasonable behaviour. The option for a no-fault application is supposed to come in before the end of 2021, which they’ll go with if it happens in time.

“I don’t see how slapping up a few deeply vapid cuts of meat…” Malfoy complains, picking up his burger and taking a bite. Adultery only counts when it’s the opposite sex, Harry’s been told. And there has to be sex. It’s funny, divorce law. Malfoy’s munching. “The need to tolerate their company outside the crucial moment was punishment enough, I assure you.”

“Your life’s very difficult, isn’t it?” suggests Harry, indulgent.

“It’s impossible,” insists Malfoy, fantastic.

* * *

Taking Malfoy out often feels like a game – one where Harry finds out what he can get away with. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, but it’s fun; it’s a distraction from work. Malfoy’s fun. He talks shit and makes Harry feel young, listening, taking it in.

“Are you dating Cousin Draco?” Teddy asks him sceptically, still living in number 12 by the final week of January. He’s in and out so much, it’s more like having a pet than a child; he hasn’t been in quarantine again. Harry’s often thought that he’d like to get a dog. “Do I need to sit you both down and talk about commitment?”

“We’re not dating,” Harry scoffs, putting on his Barbour and hat. Malfoy’s said that he should be embarrassed to dress this way until he’s walked at least fifty miles of the countryside. They’ve been exploring Wiltshire; no one’s counting where they’re up to. “What’s dating?”

“I know you have him round when I’m not here,” Teddy says, his amber eyes narrow and shrewd, though really he has missed a lot. Harry’s not told Ron or Hermione either. It’s embarrassing; he was lonely last Saturday after their walk and wanted Malfoy to try his next batch of beer, which was better than the first. “I thought that you were being saddos together,” Teddy goes on. “Now I’m wondering if you canoodle.” He makes a noodling gesture with his fingers.

“You’ll be the first to know if we canoodle,” Harry tells him, pulling firmly on the cap’s brim as he checks himself in the mirror. He looks serious and mature, he decides, even if he only smells like he’s had a shower.

 _”Not too bad!”_ the mirror agrees.

“Your Cousin Draco’s a nice man,” Harry tells Teddy in the reflection. This isn’t true, by any definition. “Nicer than he was,” he corrects.

“He’s the only gay man you know,” Teddy says, brutal.

“And he’s single,” Harry agrees. “Bit of luck, innit?” He grins.

When he turns back to reality, Teddy’s pressing a hand to his cheek, anarchy ring on his finger. He sighs comically. “Don’t fuck this up, Pika-dad,” he says when he’s talking again, his expression weary and Hufflepuff, his eyebrow pierced.

“We chat rubbish over chips,” promises Harry, searching for the appropriate words. “It’s nothing serious.” He frowns, because this doesn’t feel true.

In a moment, he’s struck by the fact that he sounds a lot like Ginny, when she was defending her relationship with Neville.

It seems bathetic now. Ginny and Neville keep being photographed holding hands and looking at each other with their hearts in their eyes. Malfoy always sends a note, calls it mawkish and sickening, though Harry’s certain that it’s romantic. It’s an in, at least, for Harry to write back and tell Malfoy to stop being rude. Invite him out. He must be bored, Harry insists, if he’s reading the gossip columns in the _Prophet_.

This tends to happen at seven o’clock in the morning. Harry’s been getting up earlier, to have time.

“When are you telling the other three?” is what Teddy asks, as though Harry’s being ridiculous and needs to be brought down from the clouds. “Albus?”

“Not before there’s been any… Why are we calling it canoodling?” Harry demands, and Teddy’s raising his eyebrows, crossing his arms and slumping to the bright pink wall. “Look, there’s no point telling Albus or Lily or James before something…” Ginny. “That would be weird.”

“Something’s already happened,” Teddy argues, most likely right. “You’re dating. Even if it’s not _serious_.” He makes quotation marks in the air with his fingers.

“We’re not dating,” Harry insists, looking in the mirror again and checking how well he’s shaved. Not quite perfectly, as ever. But in any case, Harry doesn’t fancy Malfoy. Not really. The man is just clearly into sex and he fancied Harry fifteen years ago; that’s a better shout than none. He’s funny, when he isn’t lashing out at unsuspecting waiters. “And call it _going out_ ,” he tells Teddy, frustrated, turning away from the mirror. “You’re not American.”

Teddy’s hair is honey blond for the moment, as though he’s trying something new. His amber eyes are sarcastic as ever. “You’re stepping out together on the broadwalk, Daddy-o,” he mocks, hustling his shoulders, his smirk brightening under his cowlick.

“Stop it,” Harry tells him on his way out, trying to remember when Teddy last listened.

* * *

“What I’m surprised by,” Malfoy tells Harry, as they walk down a Wiltshire road in search of the footpath they’ve lost, “is how many people think you’re incompetent.”

There aren’t many people out. The country is still under the tier system; Harry and Malfoy might technically be flouting the rules, gadding everywhere together, but they’re a metre apart, most of the time. It’s not raining at the moment, but the puddles are deep at the side of the road, filling potholes between the tarmac and the hedges.

The council should get that fixed, Malfoy’s observed; Wiltshire’s gone to the dogs; they never learn from the flooding; pass into Somerset and it’s obvious; it’s a disgrace.

He sounds worryingly like Vernon Dursley sometimes, but it’s always quaint to hear Draco Malfoy complain about tarmac and other muggle affairs. He doesn’t ever get righteously angry, and that’s different from when Harry was growing up – he offers observations with an odd sort of irony as though no one has suffered as he has. Usually, it makes Harry laugh.

It’s terrible, Harry agrees about whatever’s being said, not agreeing, and Malfoy looks at him as though to judge whether Harry’s entertained or if he’s bored, changing the subject if so. It must always be obvious, because he always gets it right.

Other times, like now, he talks to Harry about Harry, which is odd and rarely flattering, apart from the times when it is. He could be fanciable, Harry supposes, as well as wooable. Fuckable is what these words really mean, and he’s had this thought before. It’s been a long time since Harry’s seriously considered fucking anyone.

“What d’you mean by incompetent?” is what he asks.

They have to move to the side of the road at this moment, for a 4x4 to pass, and Harry’s wooing Malfoy, so he takes the opportunity to seize his arm by his black coat, huddling them out of the spray. The coat might be made of cashmere, like his green scarf. It’s not appropriate for the mud.

Malfoy leans in, as though off-balance, inhaling and warm near Harry’s ear as he retreats up the verge to the hedge. _Bit reckless,_ Harry thinks to himself.

He’s wearing leather gloves with thick seams, Malfoy, like a driver, not a perv. No hat, which will be why he feels cold. He smells of something tart and deep and a little bit green, an awful lot better than Ron’s birthday cologne.

He’s also wearing smart leather brogues. “Why’ve you worn those?” Harry tuts on seeing them, like a dad, a foot between them now. Harry’s wearing olive-green wellington boots.

“They clean up well enough,” Malfoy defends himself, not returning to the road even now the car has passed. “They’re comfortable. They’re my favourite pair of Church’s.”

“Have you been wearing them all this time?” Harry demands, meaning for all of their walks. He cannot believe that he hasn’t noticed.

With a strange, guarded shrug, Malfoy avoids the question.

“We’ll get you some wellies,” Harry decides, not thinking about wooing when his eyes catch on Malfoy’s hatless head. It’s been drizzling a bit, and he looks like he’s cold.

Taking off his own tweed cap, Harry ruffles his hair and pops the hat on Malfoy’s head, scooping it over the thin patch and pulling down the brim.

“Suits you,” decides Harry, with a grin.

It doesn’t quite. Malfoy’s hair’s gone a bit funny at the side, but Harry has no intention of telling him. He looks flustered where they’re standing by a hedge in the cool, grey air, and Harry remembers that this is part of a plan.

They look at each other for too long. Malfoy’s expression is searching, his mouth closed as though he’s holding in a question. Harry feels trapped.

Their walks are very private, not like the pub. There’s no Kreacher or Teddy to come home.

Abruptly, they’re walking again, both with their hands in their pockets, a gesture towards social distance between them. “I suppose that it can happen to the best of us,” Malfoy declares, talking about Harry’s incompetence. “We are transformed by our children into doddering old men, and it happens in the moment that we let them beat us at chess.”

“But their little faces when they win…” Harry defends daft fathers everywhere, remembering how easy it was to let himself lose. “Though, yeah,” he concedes, walking along. “I’m not sure that Ginny ever found it attractive.” Ginny likes winning. This will always be true. He’d also been blown up by the time that James turned five.

Malfoy doesn’t say anything. He’s fixing his hair to sit underneath Harry’s hat, sweeping fingers through the flop of white-blond. The hat immediately looks more expensive, back on his head.

Harry has three hats now: the original green, one blue and one brown. This one’s the blue, which is the right colour for Malfoy’s pale complexion, the pink in his cheeks and the deep bottle green of his scarf.

“I became _that dad_ ,” Harry suggests, though really he means that he wanted to be Arthur; he wanted to be perfect. Ginny wanted him to be himself, married to her, so she said. “I’m serious at work,” he insists, glancing at Malfoy’s thoughtful silence, then down the road, through the grey. “We talk about serious things, and the trainees are dizzy. They don’t realise.”

Harry feels his jaw set, and he forgets that he’s supposed to be flirting.

Ginny used to like going to the DMLE do once a year, Harry remembers. She always said that it was an excuse to get dressed up and go out; it made a change to talk about something other than quidditch or babies. Harry wondered during lockdown, when the do was cancelled, whether it wasn’t also a reminder that Harry was self-assured and powerful in the right environment. It was a reminder that there was a reason for everything about him that had changed.

Harry’s never certain if he likes the parts of himself he relies on at work – the tunnel vision and the arrogance, he suspects. “We had three of them last week,” Harry remembers, talking about the trainees. He’s never liked to talk about these things, acknowledge his own age, his rank. “Joking around, half their uniform strewn across their desks, right there on the shop floor…” He doesn’t like to complain; he tends to shout, always righteously angry even if the cause doesn’t deserve it. He sounds bitter, never ironic. “l was heading to a meeting, but this elderly witch had been left on her own while one of the juniors went to get the parchmentwork. She was one of your lot.” Slytherin, he means, glancing at Malfoy’s profile. Old school pureblood, even if they all hate Malfoy now. “Doubt she’s ever stepped foot in Oxford Street. She was scared of the phones and the fucking kids kept making them jangle.”

Harry’s not supposed to call the trainees kids. The trainees were supposed to be at separate desks; there’s a system. Malfoy doesn’t comment – but he’s listening, Harry notices, ducked into his scarf as they crunch down the road.

“What she wasn’t saying…” Harry sighs, because it took a long chat, to get this out of her. Missus Terentia Wilson, that was her name. “Her husband’d had a stroke while she was out at the shops,” Harry says, and it comes out with a huff. “She’d come home, found him not responding and walked out of the house, unable to go back. Accidental magic had sealed the place shut. In many ways the husband had been abusing her for decades, while no one gave a shit.”

Nothing breaks, when Harry says these things. The sky above looks like drizzle, though it isn’t raining yet. They’ve reached the footpath, and Malfoy leads Harry through the weathered wooden gate to the shadowed path at the side of a field. He’s not looking at Harry as though he’s polluted. He’s not drawing away; he’s clenching his jaw, as though he cares.

Harry should have talked about these things with Ginny over the years – the reasons why he’s never quit. She used to tell him that he should talk about his feelings more, whenever he did. Like that time in school when he thought that he might be possessed.

Harry’s never known how to explain that he doesn’t see sides anymore; he just sees crime and victims of crime. He doesn’t care who’s who, and he doesn’t know if that’s good; he’s had training in unconscious bias.

“There was nothing that we could do, really,” Harry tells Malfoy, as an experiment. There’s nothing at stake in telling Malfoy, he reminds himself. It’s Malfoy; he’s a git. “I sent the junior down with a breaker and one of the pathologists. Joked about how we weren’t doing cups of tea while her daughter-in-law came to pick her up; let her talk shit, I don’t know… Put a trace on her, in case she was lying and the bastard had been murdered. She shouldn’t really have left him, but I doubt that we’ll prosecute. She knew that. It’s why she came in.”

Harry tips his head to the side, walking along.

“I gave the trainees a bollocking about what it means to serve to the public. None of this was anything to do with me,” he finds himself complaining, not really meaning it. “I’m working on this thing across departments.” The techy potions case; he never says he works in counter-terrorism; he’s supposed to keep it discreet. “And I’m supposed to be working on the action plan with the rest of the Ministry group, you know, following up the inquiry.”

Growing up muggle makes him qualified to talk about race, according to the DMLE. If he’s anything but white, no one’s told him.

 _We’re not ourselves in this place,_ is what he told the trainees, his voice somehow filling the room. He fears he really meant that they are. He must sound like a squishy yellow pikachu around his children, given that this is how they see him. 

“It’s difficult sometimes, to feel proud of the Office,” Harry tells Malfoy. The Ministry group keeps getting delayed with the action plan. The findings of the inquiry weren’t pretty; Kingsley’s called the whole thing a farce, retired these days, though Harry asks him a lot for advice – he’s been divorced since Harry was fifteen because he chose Harry and the war. “But if we don’t believe in what we’re doing, then what are we? We’re nothing but trained thugs.”

Harry still believes in the DMLE, just about. He’s not sure if there’s an alternative.

“I told them that if I saw or heard word of them acting so unprofessionally again,” Harry remembers, thinking about the trainees, two of them white, Hogwarts’ finest, “They wouldn’t get another chance to qualify. They’d fail and they’d be out.”

He finds himself grimacing, to remember it. The path is riddled with puddles, dipping from the sides to the centre; there are stones. This isn’t a problem for Harry in his wellies, but Malfoy has to weave a new route in his smart shoes and trousers; Harry steadies him as he wobbles, up the side. He slips and Harry seizes his shoulder, his elbow, and he glances with thanks, his muscles moving as he regains his balance.

“It would be difficult to fail them for that, in reality,” Harry goes on, thinking about what it takes not to pass a trainee through. At least nowadays. It used to be that recruits could be failed on a whim – this was always the threat. Now it’s only severe and well-catalogued incompetence, nothing less. This was one of Herpes’ reforms; the DMLE countered by making the auror application process approximately four weeks long. It’s been swings and roundabouts, in terms of diversity. “I’m pretty sure that I could find a way,” insists Harry, besides. “I took them on where people were watching,” Harry remembers. “That’s how people always humiliated me.”

A huffing grin breaks out of Malfoy at this, because he’s listening – and he likely remembers.

“Sometimes I don’t know why I’m so crap, you know, compared to that, when it comes to the children,” Harry reflects, not sure what they’re talking about anymore. “But, like, what I do at work, it’s to break someone down; it’s to give them an absolute choice. I know that there must be a better way, but the trainees need to unlearn their habits. We’ve made a commitment to them and they’ve made a commitment to us. No one needs to break down a seven-year-old.” He finds himself frowning to think of it, sorrow in his throat, because he knows how it feels to be broken. “The children never agreed to be raised by my rules; I don’t know how to enforce them.”

“I’m not sure that policing by consent is a relevant consideration, inside family,” Malfoy remarks smartly as they enter an unflooded stretch of path. “Our private homes are each its own authoritarian state. Some much more fascist than others,” he jokes.

“Yeah, and I was always the rebel hero,” Harry remarks flippantly. He feels lighter, having told the story, not finding himself judged. He knows that he should be. “With a motorbike and a cause.”

Malfoy looks at him, unimpressed. “One cannot ride a motorbike while making homemade jam,” he says, as though he thinks that Harry could pull off a motorbike all right.

The countryside is lovely, Harry thinks, even if it’s mostly mud, for January, and the sky is grey. They’re under overhanging trees now, all branches. Last week, when they were out in the morning, the ground glittered with frost and the sun shined white-gold through the mist. “I’m doing what I’ve always wanted to do!” he protests, though he has no plans to get a motorbike. That was Sirius’s thing. “The time is now. Maybe I’ll run a delivery service.” For his jam, he means. And for his beer.

“Leave a few eccentricities for the rest of us,” Malfoy suggests, still wearing Harry’s hat on his head.

Harry looks at him more closely. “What are you doing for your mid-life crisis?” he asks, before he realises that this question is insulting. But they’re both the same age; they know that they are.

“I thought that I was being obvious,” Malfoy scoffs, not missing a beat, meeting Harry’s eyes before looking around. It strikes Harry that Malfoy likely owns no clothes suitable for where they are. He may well have lived in London for the past twenty years. “I’m _getting back to my roots_ ,” he mocks himself, “and it’s horrendous,” he says like a man from the city, looking at Harry with an expression as though they both know he’s lying, Harry’s blue hat on his head. “Look at my Church’s!”

Harry glances down, and the black leather’s thickly streaked with mud. The trousers too.

“I did say,” Harry points out.

Malfoy huffs, as though this makes it no less Harry’s fault. It’s different from being out with Ginny in so many ways.

There’s a sign at the fork in the path. They had vague plans to go on the long route through the woods. “It’s only a half mile to the village,” Harry points out instead, taking hold of Malfoy’s elbow, the black wool. “I think we’ve earned the pub; come on.”

“You don’t need to sop to me,” Malfoy complains, because Harry can’t win, and Harry’s old enough to recognise a sulk.

“Clearly I do,” he disagrees, tugging Malfoy in the right direction, and he’s awful, he realises, feeling guilty. He’s a dad. He’s about to start calling Malfoy Dracetto.

He doesn’t let go.

They decide on the first pub they come to – barely more than a double-fronted cottage. There’s a run of picnic tables out the front. Despite its size, the pub’s invested in awning and heat lamps; they’re only allowed to sit outside in the cold.

Malfoy sighs with unguarded relief when Harry puts down the pint in front of him, bought at a window, still wearing Harry’s hat and his gloves and his cashmere scarf, ever a dashing dark green.

Looking down at Malfoy’s muddy shoes, Harry remembers that he’s wooing him, which is convenient, really, and he sneaks out his wand to clean his trousers and cast the polishing spell he uses for the boots of his auror uniform, no matter that he shouldn’t in muggle public. It’s a rough-and-ready charm that he uses on the shoes, transfiguring what shouldn’t be there into polish, supplementing that and spreading it around, buffing the leather to a shine.

It doesn’t feel like anything, on thick auror boots. From the way that Malfoy jumps, it’s clear he feels the pressure through his supple leather shoes. Harry wonders if it feels sensual. It must be ticklish at least, sweeping up the inside of his foot and over his toes. It’s unrepentantly fussy.

There’s heat in Malfoy’s eyes, when Harry looks up. “Are you managing me, Harry?” he asks, disbelief breaking into teeth.

Harry wasn’t aware that they were using first names. It gives him a jolt, to hear his own in an easy, posh huff. “Draco,” he says, surprised by how angular the name is, when it’s not drawled. He pauses, thinks of a line. “I think you’re enjoying it.”

He finds his toes curling inside his wellington boots, he turns Draco Malfoy so pink.

* * *

There’s an owl from Ginny, right at the end of the month. It makes Harry startle, but he supposes that they should get used to communicating. They’ll be doing it for the rest of their lives; they likely should have sussed it before.

 _I think that we should sit together at the Ravenclaw match,_ it says, as though Ginny’s had the same thought. No time like the present, to make things how they should be. _Cheer on Albus. Fuck the mums and dads after – come back to mine and we’ll talk about Easter._

This sounds sensible, Harry thinks, barely blinking at the idea of Ginny having somewhere that’s hers. He’s seen it once, now. He writes an explanation to Draco(!) immediately, because they have unspoken plans – but something stays his hand before he can give the note to his loyal friend Spearow the eagle owl, as named by Lily.

He remembers the tension between them, outside the pub. He told Teddy that he and Draco weren’t serious, but he remembers the counsellor working them through Ginny’s feelings, not too far off a year ago now, them both sat prickling around Ginny’s phone on the table. He remembers the feeling in his chest, because he knew when she was talking – he just knew.

It’s not serious with Draco, Harry doesn’t think – but then…

 _I told Draco Malfoy I’d sit with him,_ he writes to Ginny, changing his mind. He wonders if she’ll know one way or the other, by the end of the Ravenclaw match. He wonders if he’s making a mistake. He’s mostly just acting, in this moment, because he doesn’t want to send the note where he tells Draco they’re cancelled. _He’s always on his own at these things. Can he sit with us?_

He sounds like a ten-year-old child, Harry thinks.

 _Change of plans for quidditch,_ he tells Draco, erasing his note from before. He takes a deep breath, which he doesn’t understand. _I’m meeting up with Ginny after, whenever that is. We’re all sitting together. How about a sober pub before?_ He remembers to add, _HP_. He’s not sure why these two letters make it feel like he’s flirting.

 _Let me take you to breakfast at the Wolseley, HP,_ Draco writes back, definitely flirting. He never takes Harry out; Harry’s quite taken aback. _I know how much you like it round there._ This is a joke about how much Harry’s been going on about his Fortnum’s jam, Harry realises when he googles what and where the Wolseley is. _If you’ve never been, I promise you, it’s a treat. The pinnacle of muggle twattery, as far as I’m concerned._ He sounds like a wizard long converted, at least to the pomp. It’s oddly attractive and Harry finds himself smiling, arranging to meet.

It will have been Astoria, Harry realises, who took him to these places first.

“I think I’m dating Draco Malfoy,” Harry tells Kreacher anyway, because there’s no one else to listen. He’s sitting in the basement of a house which ranges five floors above him. There are two high windows to the street where owls fly in and out, just like in the days of the Order. Harry leaves them open; the walls are painted teal. “Are you OK with that?”

Kreacher looks at him with cloudy bullfrog eyes, and Harry knows that his every instinct is to tell his master yes. “Master Harry has become an auctioneer?” he succeeds in asking, his arch tone frail and hoarse and delicate, confused.

“Yep,” agrees Harry, nodding at the deep green-blue walls. “That’s it exactly.” He feels a smirk cross his face. “I’d say that he’s a nineteenth-century repro. Anything between 1860 and 1892. Expensive, but not as much as an original.”

“Kreacher must be preparing luncheon,” Kreacher says, before he’s vanished from the kitchen, ironically, with a _crack_.

“I’m a comedian,” Harry tells no one, in the quiet.


	6. January, February

It’s obvious when Harry and Draco arrive together at the Slytherin-Ravenclaw match, fresh from what may be the best breakfast Harry’s ever eaten. He doesn’t understand why he’s never had kedgeree before.

“Where does it come from?” Harry asked, looking up from the menu. They were surrounded by pomp-or-is-it-twattery and diners enjoying it, mostly middle-aged, mostly white. Polished, moisturised tourists, Harry guessed, and muggles not wearing their suit jackets, doing business. It was something, to realise how well he and Draco fit in. “Is it like shakshuka?” He had that out with Teddy, once.

“It’s from colonial India by way of servant British cooks,” Draco explained kedgeree, rolling his eyes at Harry’s suggestion that they might serve shakshuka in an establishment like this. His expression was wicked over the glass and bright crockery, and it was nice to see him in daylight, out of his coat. He was wearing a slim roll-neck jumper, like so often, this one midnight blue, the fizzing flip of Harry’s insides a reminder of what he wanted from him. “It’s a symbol of this country’s entirely unpleasant history: curried haddock, eggs and rice. It’s a classic; still keen?”

Harry ordered it anyway, because he likes to try new things and the elements together sounded good. He’s always fallen into Draco’s traps.

“Tell Teddy that the only thing he can eat is fatty meat and boiled potatoes,” Draco suggested, paying the bill. Harry watched him add it up the way that Ginny used to do. Thumb a card and prod a number into the machine. “That tofu he ruins is nothing more than cultural appropriation. What would he expect you to do? Give the turmeric back and the Marbles while we’re at it?”

“I’ll just say I had Eggs Benedict,” was Harry’s suggestion, well aware that guilt is a self-indulgent emotion, as Teddy would say, and that Draco first heard of the Elgin-or-is-it-Parthenon Marbles around the same time he did.

Draco laughed, at least, which felt like victory. They talked about the fact that the only good tofu Harry’s ever had was in Japan, and whether saying so made him a nob. “Yes,” was Draco’s answer. “But that doesn’t make it less true. I know a place in Soho; we’ll go there.”

And Harry’s grown used to grinning and watching when Draco laughs, but it’s clear that no one else yet expects it of him. They get a few looks in Hogsmeade, because everyone knows who they are.

They’ve given up on social distance between them. Harry’s been too busy keeping up with bumping arms and fussing at the gap between Draco’s collar and his scarf. Putting Draco in his hat, though he hasn’t today, because this quidditch bit isn’t part of the date, if this is a date.

“How have you been, Draco?” Ginny asks him, with a smirk and raised eyebrows, clearly aware of what’s going on. She and Draco have been in each other’s circles for years; Draco and Luna are close, Harry’s frequently reminded, even if Luna’s decided to hole up in the States for a bit. And Ginny doesn’t mind one or two of the Slytherin mums, from what Harry remembers. The gossip’s better than in Gryffindor, she used to say.

She and Draco use first names, apparently. Harry supposes that this makes it less weird for Draco and him.

“Trudging through the countryside,” complains Draco about what he’s been up to, as though it’s not a secret. He’s always complaining; Harry’s not sure that he knows how else to talk. “Your ex-husband is bored and his job keeps him much too much fit and active.”

Harry startles a little at the word _fit_. But he has to keep active; it maintains the magic in his leg.

As for Draco’s job, he doesn’t speak about it. By this point Harry feels sure that he knows what it is. There’s a reason they’ve not yet and will never end up in the paper.

“I’m developing a set of calluses.” _If I dealt in intelligence for a living,_ Harry hears the implication; _I would be required to have a filter._ “I suspect a gut from the beer.”

It’s a manipulative method of conversation. It makes Harry think of Draco’s gut, which doesn’t exist. His stomach’s clearly flat underneath his elegant jumpers, and his shoulders to his hips is a slim, attractive vee. He’s making Ginny think about his lack of gut and all the time he’s spending with Harry – her eyes flash to Harry’s, her jaw set into a tight mouth and freckles, and he’s never known what to do with her jealousy.

It’s become a competition, and Ginny likes winning. “You should see him in a Turkish market,” she says about Harry, raising her chin, making Draco think of the years they spent married – when it was only ever that Harry wanted to get to the end. It wasn’t clear that there was one. “He’s a Gryffindor,” Ginny pushes, unapologetic. “We’re all hyperactive and we all get bored.”

This lands like accidental insight into Harry and Ginny’s marriage, rather than as it must have been intended. Draco’s raising his eyebrows, cool, as though there’s no need to reply.

“Is Nev about?” Harry breaks the awkward silence.

Reacting, Ginny’s steps another step down the stand, unconsciously establishing her distance in a way that Harry and Draco are not. She looks flustered, as though ashamed of her dig, her jealous feelings. Harry wants to tell her that this is the point of going out with Draco: he’ll always be more of an arsehole.

Just the thought of saying these words makes Harry feel like a shit. Yet he also knows that they would make Draco laugh.

“One of his plants needs attention,” Ginny’s saying about Neville, so nicely, rolling her eyes, everything about her demeanour unconsciously revealing. As though she’s in love with him for being responsible. “He’s particular about his plants. He’ll be here as soon as.”

“Right.” Harry’s not sure what to say now. He’s never been particular, he finds himself thinking. Even for the case with the Vow, before lockdown, he was only ever in the planning to approximately eighty percent. They have technicians to suss out the rest. “Are the teams out yet?” he asks Ginny, looking past her to the pitch, moving on as quickly as possible.

“Yeah, yeah, any minute now,” she says vaguely, leading the way down to the front.

* * *

In the end, the match is a long one, and Ravenclaw wins with the snitch. At Ginny’s house Harry and Ginny don’t make plans for Easter; they end up in tearful recriminations about the fact that they never used to go out for breakfast, even though Harry’s sure that no one they knew ever did.

They never used to row.

“He invited me out!” Harry finds himself shouting, self-righteous. “I didn’t _ask him to breakfast_.”

“That’s not the point –”

“I mean, I would,” he insists, while Ginny glares at him, clearly at home in her fresh and bright cottage living room, two small rooms with the long wall knocked through. “That’s what you do when you’re seeing someone. I take him out; I used to take you out, when you’d let me.”

“When I _let_ you –”

Neville tries to mediate: “Let’s calm down…”

“And since when are you _seeing_ Draco Malfoy –?”

“Fuck off, Neville,” Harry snaps, too hot. “I’ve been seeing him ages –”

“Don’t fucking swear at Neville!” Ginny immediately reacts with a huff of red hair, her eyes narrow, her robes easy colours, cream and tan.

“I’ve been seeing him since Christmas –”

“Christmas, wow. So he’s your fling?” Ginny, like Harry, can be self-righteous when she’s on the defence. It’s possible that they have things in common. “You bring your fling to watch Albus play quidditch –”

“He was coming anyway!” Harry defends himself, glaring at Ginny’s hard scowl. “He’s always here anyway! You brought Neville to Hufflepuff –”

“Neville teaches at the school!”

“I’m going to lie down,” Neville says, looking peaky, entirely at home in Ginny’s house where there are so many plants.

Harry was intending to pop by Draco’s after seeing Ginny. They haven’t made explicit plans, but this felt like what they were doing. Instead, Harry sends Spearow to fob Draco off and settles into a fume – puts on his hat and his Barbour again to fume over a beer and his beer-making book in the Leaky, like an old man, because the house is too empty when Kreacher knows to stay out of his way.

He’s not supposed to care anymore, Harry knows. He’s not supposed to care that Ginny and Neville happened when they did, because Harry’s always chosen work, right back to the age of seventeen. He and Ginny are supposed to feel nothing for each other, now, because there’s supposed to have been nothing left.

His divorce is supposed to be perfect, like his job and his marriage and his children. He’s supposed to be living the life that his parents never got to have, and if he isn’t then he’s supposed to be letting them rest.

Teddy finds him after lunch and tells him to go for a walk around a farmer’s market, because that’s something he can do outside. “Buy some piccalilli,” he suggests, as though this will cheer Harry up. “Pretend you have opinions about different types of beet.”

“ _Beet?_ ” Harry asks, feeling contrary, holding his book, trying to remember if he likes sour beer. The Leaky Cauldron doesn’t serve it. “What’s beet? D’you mean _beetroot?_ It’s purple and it tastes like school dinners; what else is there to know?”

“That’s not the –”

“I stole a massive jar of it from school once, when I was nine, and I basically lived off it for a week. Don’t talk to me about beetroot.”

Teddy stares at him, amber eyes immediately glossy with tears as he blinks rapidly, the way he does when Harry does this – so very rarely; no more than three or four times in Teddy’s life, Harry’s certain. He’ll remember each one perfectly; in Harry’s head the memories are vague. All he knows is that he’s never done this with the other kids: used his shit life as a weapon to make them shut up.

“Aren’t you fun?” Teddy reflects coolly in his cream-coloured puffer jacket, his hair rippling bright blue from honey blond, which had a good run. He looks away and then he’s looking back, clenching his jaw while he sniffs. “It’s like you’re getting divorced.”

Harry swallows, looking down at the end of his chips and his pie and his pint.

Teddy sits down opposite him, refusing to vanish from sight. He answered back the last time Harry did this, maybe age sixteen, fully grown into his confidence but not quite into his empathy. _Dad, no one gives a fuck that your life was shit in the eighties._ He had a point.

They’re so similar, sometimes. Harry knows that Teddy wishes he was something that he’s not: poor; queer; disgraced in some way. Clumsy. Bookish and bad at sport. None of these things are virtues; Harry’s only ever tried to raise him fair.

“It’s Hogsmeade next week,” admits Harry, looking down at his plate and remembering how he used to always, always finish his chips. “McGonagall asked if I’d like the others home.” This was in a letter, then the floo.

“What’d you say?” Teddy asks him too sympathetically, and Harry knows that he shouldn’t be talking to him about this.

He’s such a shit godfather, Harry thinks. “What would be the point?” is what Harry told Minerva, and it sounds callous now. “It’s not like it’s Christmas.”

“Wow,” reflects Teddy, sounding unimpressed. Harry wonders if Sirius felt like this, when he was telling him to be fun like his James.

“D’you think that they’d come?” Harry asks Teddy, looking up, starting to cry right there in the pub. “You can all go to Ginny’s; I don’t mind.” There was an idea about him seeing them at Ginny’s. He’s not sure it’s sensible now.

“I’ll see what the others want to do,” Teddy tells him, not promising anything. “Come on, Dad; let’s go home,” Teddy suggests, hunched and flapping his puffy elbows like he’s cold, his parents’ words written on his skin somewhere Harry can’t see. “I’ve been getting texts after you. Uncle Ron and Auntie Hermione are pining; you’ve been too busy wooing my cousin.”

“Once removed,” Harry mumbles into the end of his pint, looking away from Teddy’s expression.

“Gran’s nephew,” Teddy tells him, witty like both of his parents. Harry tries not to say it. “You’ll give me a complex.”

When Ron and Hermione arrive, Harry finds himself being interrogated. They’re sitting in the orange formal living room, taking tea and sandwiches Harry’s made from another Fortnum’s haul. He’s managed to dissuade Kreacher from bulking it out into a full afternoon tea, and it’s likely that Ron and Hermione don’t know that he’s in a mood.

“We haven’t seen you since Christmas,” Hermione’s saying, curled up and content. It’s February now.

 _See_ , Harry wants to tell Ginny. _Since Christmas is a long time._

There’s a TV in the corner; the modular sofa is arranged so those sitting can watch it. They’re not watching it now, but none of them are wearing robes.

“Yeah; how’s the wooing?” Ron agrees with Hermione, arm framed around her shoulders. They’re always so close together.

“It’s all right,” decides Harry, sitting where the sofa turns. “We’ve been going on walks. There’s been no canoodling,” he adds for some reason.

Teddy’s retreated upstairs. Harry’s glad, or he’d have earned himself a long sigh with that remark.

Hermione’s flicking her wand to pour him a cup of tea. “We haven’t seen you in six weeks,” she repeats. “And it’s been six months.”

“So what?” asks Harry. He attempts an explanation. “I’m taking it slow. We’re not supposed to…” He makes a vague gesture, mashing his hand to the air.

“Harry,” says Hermione rudely, hovering the cup into Harry’s fingers.

“Well, it’s not like he’s snogged me,” Harry rebukes her, taking a sip. “It’s Malfoy,” he tries to protest.

Ron sighs. “Yeah, but he knows, right?” he says, badgering Hermione for a sandwich so that he doesn’t have to lean forward. She whips it to his face; he has to catch. “You’ve come out,” he continues asking Harry. “You’ve explained that you’re seeing him romantically – mental as that is – and you’ve told him that you’re looking for something exclusive but not necessarily long-term…”

Looking at him, Harry checks for signs of Polyjuice. “I thought that we agreed to stop saying _mental_.”

It makes Hermione laugh, Harry’s expression. She pokes Ron in the arm. “Rose’s year are all on Hogsmeade negotiations,” she explains, taking pity.

Rose’s year is Albus’s year, Harry remembers. They are not part of the same scene.

“They make each other sign pre-nups, it seems like,” Hermione’s joking. “Everyone has to agree who’s going as friends and who’s going romantically, on what terms. Rose has been asked by two girls and three boys,” she says proudly, amused. “The prefects run a tribunal if anything goes wrong.”

“That’s James,” Harry remembers, because they’re talking about Gryffindor.

Ron’s munching his sandwich. “Mm,” he says, agreeing. “Rosie reckons he’s fair.”

Harry feels lost. “But there’s flirting,” he insists, because he thinks that there is. “I can’t break that up with a load of chat about…”

Scoffing, Hermione doesn’t sound impressed. “Where have you been for the past five years? It’s hardly good flirting if it can’t stand a reality check.”

“Well, I don’t want to,” Harry insists. The whole thing feels fragile; he doesn’t want to push.

“You need to give him a clear signal,” Hermione insists. “You’re the inexperienced one. He’s been out for years.” She says this as though she knew before Harry told her.

“We’re all behind you,” Ron agrees, pumping a rather sarcastic fist. His hair’s clashing against the orange walls, but Ginny was the same, Harry thinks. She looked great. She filled this house with red hair and laughter to the end.

“I’ve been busy,” Harry excuses himself. He thought that he’d been doing all right. He looks down at his hands on his knees, his bitten nails – the injunction not to tell lies. “We don’t see each other much – he’s busy too.”

“What does he do?” Ron demands, bemused.

Harry glances at Hermione, who’s so deep in the Ministry…

There’s nothing obvious that he can see in Hermione’s expression. She’s just curled up next to Ron, equally flattered by the burnt orange walls, which aren’t far from the shade of her cardi. But she isn’t saying anything, and that’s always a clue, when it’s Hermione.

“He has business abroad,” Harry makes up, and it’s easy, when he does it.

With a glance, Hermione looks at him, frowning. She was expecting him to say that he didn’t know, Harry thinks, or else share his suspicions. But Harry feels oddly protective of Draco, he finds. This will mean a lot of things, if he does for a living what Harry thinks he does.

And he doesn’t know how rebounds work, so that could be all this is, panic and displaced feelings and anger, which need to find somewhere to go. But he doesn’t think it is.

He wonders if Ginny and Neville are sleeping together yet. This afternoon. Right now. He wonders how soon into September they started. Everyone’s sleeping together, it feels like sometimes.

“Look, all we’re asking is that you’re sure that he’s seeing you how you are,” Ron’s saying, protective. “Not hooking up with floozies on the side.”

“ _Ron,_ ” says Hermione in barely a breath, turning her head.

“Everyone knows that he slept around on Astoria!” Ron insists, ever a huge gossip, always behind. He sits up, not very skinny anymore. “No one’s ever said that it was men,” he allows. “But he did.”

Harry grins at him, to be sitting here with the two of them in front of his TV, in front of his floo. He loves his friends. “I don’t think that he’s hooking up with floozies,” he says. He thinks that he knows what he’s doing. “It was an outlet; I don’t think he enjoyed it.”

Ron’s leaning forward for another sandwich. “There’s something off about him,” he says, ever the moral judge. “It’s different from school, but it’s –”

“It’s just the sex,” Harry says automatically, though now he wonders whether this cover hasn’t always been convenient too. “His mates are all at it with each other. They’re relaxed about it.”

There’s likely something in his expression, because Hermione sighs. “Well, if that’s the case…” _Stop pretending you’re unaware that he fancies you._

Caught out, Harry says nothing, acknowledging this.

“Yeah, I don’t get it,” Ron’s saying, and Harry finds himself swallowing. “You broke up with Gin to fuck a bloke,” he tells Harry, when this isn’t what he said; he opened a door; he didn’t… “It’s been six months and you’ve got a bloke on the line who likes fucking. I mean, there are more difficult sums.”

“I’m wooing him; just drop it, all right?” Harry tells him, having had enough. He’s never told Ron and Hermione how little sex he and Ginny were having by the end.

The tension is weird, after this. Usually Ron’s the one to telling Hermione to drop it, sometimes Harry – rarely because he knows something they don’t, but because he knows how to read a room and between the lines.

He looks at Harry now and he reads something. “Oh mate,” he says sympathetically, wincing.

There’s a reason, Harry thinks, that he never made a real effort after Ginny moved out. There’s a reason why he never got an app. It feels an awful lot like fear, and he’s supposed to be a Gryffindor.

Thankfully, they’re interrupted at this awkward moment by Albus’s voice, calling shortly from Harry’s pocket for his dad.

Retreating, Harry takes the call in the lavender-purple living room upstairs – but it’s the same conversation, it turns out.

“Scorpius’s dad told Scorpius that he’s been going to pub with you,” is what Albus says, his green eyes sharp, the background behind him Slytherin green.

“And Scorpius’s dad told Scorpius to tell you this?” Harry asks, feeling annoyed. He only wanted Draco not to have to sit on his own at a quidditch match, and now all this –

He’s not sure who he’s annoyed with. In the immediate moment, it feels like Draco has taken things out of his hands; retaliated for Harry’s snub after quidditch by telling his son about Harry… But they were having breakfast together this morning, before quidditch, so that doesn’t seem right. It seems paranoiac.

He knows that they haven’t… He knows that at their age, in 2021, it’s strange that they’ve not yet kissed. Social distance is not an excuse; they share food.

On the mirror, Albus snorts. “Mr Malfoy told Scorpius that it wasn’t significant and that he should stop trying to read between the lines.”

With a pang, Harry’s stomach feels hollow.

“Why is Scorpius’s dad telling Scorpius not to read between the lines about you two going to the pub together?” Albus demands, and he seems to be interpreting this line very differently from Harry. “Mum’s been going to the pub with Professor Gnomeo, and even the Hufflepuffs…”

Harry snorts before he can help himself. _Professor Gnomeo_. He remembers that muggle film. James adored it, and then the other kids too.

Albus looks rather proud of himself, for making Harry laugh. He smiles and his eyes glint.

“Maybe it’s because you and Scorpius shouldn’t read between the lines,” Harry tells his son, gathering himself, thinking of Neville, tired and going to bed. He loves Neville like a brother he doesn’t see very much, and Ginny clearly loves him like something else. “Don’t be rude about Professor Longbottom and don’t be rude about Hufflepuff,” he says diligently. “Your godbrother’s a Hufflepuff.”

“James is ruder about Slytherin all the time!”

Harry rolls his eyes, because for a long time this was true. “Yeah, well, he shouldn’t be, and you should rise above it.”

“That’s crap.”

With a sigh, Harry remembers the days when Albus was small and uncertain and worried about finding himself in the house he calls home. A lot has changed since then. “I’m sorry about the match,” Harry changes the subject, pulling his reconstructed leg up with him onto the sofa. “Sometimes that’s how these things go.”

Albus sneers as though he’s still working through the loss. “The weather was bad,” he excuses himself, his red hair a mop – and at least he’s not lashing out, Harry thinks.

“It was,” agrees Harry, because this is true. “You’ll get it against Gryffindor.” It was odd when Harry first said this. It’s odd again now.

“Thanks, Dad,” Albus tells him, which is odd. His expression is wicked, his eyes green. “You know that you’ve just wished Lily a loss? She’s Gryffindor seeker.”

Harry feels his face drop. All of him drops. “What?” he asks before he can stop himself.

“I told them that no one had told you.” Albus sounds smug.

Gryffindor-Ravenclaw was the first game of the year. He’s missed his daughter’s first school quidditch match. “ _What?_ ” Gryffindor-Hufflepuff is in a couple of weeks.

“Oh no – no, Dad,” Albus is telling him, the look on his face suggesting that he’s just discovered empathy. Regret at least. Surprise, to find out that Harry cares. “No, she’s only a reserve. But Partridge is taking his OWLs, and fifth and seventh don’t play quidditch in the summer term, remember?”

“Oh,” Harry says, panic still running through him. He remembers this. They brought in the rule about halfway through Teddy’s school career. It makes sense. “Why don’t any of you tell me these things?” he finds himself asking, resentful.

Albus looks hurt. Spiteful. “Why don’t you find out?”

“You need to tell me things,” Harry doubles down. “I don’t see you for months at a time, for Merlin’s sake. How tall are you now? What’s going on?”

Rolling his eyes, Albus throws up his defences. “You’re such a Gryffindor,” he says, his favourite pejorative. He’s scowling off to the right, private about himself since the day he was born. “You can’t just ask me to lay out the details of my life for your consumption.”

“I write you letters,” Harry insists. He and Ginny always shared this, and he’s still in the habit. “You’re supposed to reply.” They’ve been giving him practically nothing, all year.

“I’m bored of this conversation,” says Albus, looking away.

Harry walks straight into the trap. “You don’t get to be _bored_ of your family,” he says.

“Oh Dad, yes you do,” Albus retorts, and there’s nothing left to say after this.

Too full of feeling, after this, Harry storms downstairs and grabs his coat and hat, tells no one that he’s going out and apparates to the address where he intended to come, before he fobbed Draco off.

He knows that it wasn’t any kind of retaliation. He’s very nearly sure.

He’s just – had enough.

Draco’s house is not in a muggle area. It’s on one of the plusher (short) residential streets off Diagon Alley, a townhouse much like number 12, but smaller. According to Draco, his mother and father should have downsized from Malfoy Manor when he married Astoria, but there was a lot of waffling and in the end Draco and Astoria bought themselves a new family home here in London.

Astoria still owns half. Draco’s parents wouldn’t let him use family money to buy her out, so for now he pays her rent. Albus has stayed here a couple of times, but Harry would have thought that he’d never been here before if Draco hadn’t brought it up in December.

Charging up the steps, Harry has no plan at all. There’s no bell to ring, nor a knocker. The door opens for him and an elf is just inside.

“Mopsy welcomes Auror Harry Potter to number 17…”

“Hello Mopsy,” Harry interrupts, forcing a smile, remembering the message at Christmas. He doesn’t think they’ve met, but he feels like he knows Mopsy; he’s heard stories and she’s had to deal with dear Spearow the owl. “Is Draco upstairs?” He’s been told that the upstairs living room is supposed to be kept smart for guests.

Promptly Draco appears, turning down the stairs to the hall. He’s wearing what he was wearing this morning, midnight blue and grey, and he still looks discomfortingly good.

“That’ll do, Mopsy,” Draco says oddly kindly, and Mopsy disapparates with a _pop_.

“Why did you tell Scorpius that we’ve been going to the pub?” Harry demands, hot in his throat, everything returning to him the moment Mopsy leaves. _What the fuck are we doing?_ he feels like he’s asking.

Rearing up, his spine straight, Draco blinks. The decoration is inevitably tasteful, in this hallway: a chequerboard marble floor and deep beige walls. Touches of Versace gold.

“Scorpius has been talking to Albus,” Harry carries on, refusing to let himself be distracted, “and now Albus is being off with me.”

“Being _off_ with you?” Draco retorts, looking Harry up and down. “What does that look like? Does it look like this?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Harry knows that he’s being self-righteous.

“Why have you dressed up as a cattleherd, simply to berate me?”

Staring at him, Harry finds himself so outraged that he doesn’t know what to say. He finds himself pulling his hat from his head and spinning the thing at Draco like a star. “Fuck you, you fucking dick.”

Neither the insult nor the throw has much heft and the hat spins to the chequerboard floor at Draco’s feet. With his wand, Draco spells it to a built-in cupboard, full height and not under the stairs. The door receives it with a satisfied _kerthunk_.

“I encourage my son to express polite interest in the lives of those he associates with,” Draco keeps talking while Harry scuffs up his hair, so annoyed. Draco’s explaining, his eyes sharp and his elbows even sharper as he tucks his wand away. “That includes me.”

He doesn’t have a gut from beer at all, Harry thinks. He has a subtle but emphatically masculine musculature, grazed by grey wool trousers. Black socks and slippers with gold bits.

“In one of our recent SMS exchanges he successfully remembered to ask what I had been up to. So I told him. He seemed to think that it meant more than it does.”

“I thought that it meant we were dating,” Harry tells Draco, thoughts full of him slipping off his slippers. He looks up.

“Ah,” acknowledges Draco, looking to the side. There’s a reception room there, Harry sees, almost exactly like number 12, Grimmauld Place, though everything in this house is smart.

“Hang on.” Harry looks back, and Draco meets his eyes. “Did you say _SMS exchanges?_ ”

Immediately Draco defends himself, holding up his hands. “Practically all of his peers were sent to school with one,” he says. “Astoria and I didn’t want him left out.”

Harry and Ginny reached the same conclusion with Albus, no matter that they still thought muggle phones were a gimmick at the time. Teddy had one by NEWTs, but the signal was patchy and the school was unsympathetic to the fact that Hogwarts had no sockets for charging. He took it on as cause when he was made Head Boy, because he was by that point very fucking radical indeed and didn’t care that the _Daily Prophet_ called him ridiculous. Harry likes to think that Minerva doesn’t regret the appointment. Andromeda was proud.

“I have no other use for it,” Draco insists, pulling what Harry thinks is an iPhone from his back pocket. “I would use it to buy things, but now I have you,” he says like an absolute git, brandishing the phone like a credit card. “The little games are pointless,” he rants. “They keep asking for money; it’s like raising an ungrateful child.”

Harry doesn’t comment on this. “So we’re not dating, then,” is what he says, sounding bitter. “Because I’m fine with that,” he insists, entirely passive aggressive.

Draco looks down as the phone pings, tapping and sweeping and confidently typing a reply. “HP, I took you to the Wolseley,” he says, his tone dismissive, and Harry flushes to be given the name of a sauce. They were children once, he thinks desperately: full of inherited hate. “I don’t take just anyone to the Wolseley.”

“So we _are_ dating,” Harry suggests. His mouth has gone dry. “Because I’m fine with that too,” he manages, and he thinks that this is surely not the conversation Ron and Hermione wanted him to have. It’s also nothing like the nebulous thoughts in his head; he can barely remember them. He feels unbalanced on his leg. “It’s just that Albus –” He finds his voice rising again.

Smirking, Draco sets his eyes solid on Harry’s and he’s left entirely aflutter. It doesn’t feel like wooing. Harry feels entirely out of control. “So you’re up for anything –?” Draco suggests, his teeth sharp.

“I’ve developed an attraction to men over the past twenty years,” Harry says suddenly, clumsily, because he’s not yet said it out loud, to Draco Malfoy, to him. “Something like that; I’m not really sure… People with cocks, is that what I should say? If I’ve met a transgender person, I didn’t notice; once when I was a junior –”

Draco huffs air past his teeth, incredulous. “I only care about whether you’re attracted to me,” he says bluntly, and Harry hopes that he’s lying, even as he finds his gaze dipping to the cut of his trousers. Draco’s expression is evil when Harry jumps and looks up.

“I’m not ready for my kids to know,” he keeps going, because he’s sure of this.

As though he’s both won and lost a bet with himself, Draco bobs his head wryly to the side. “Well, you’re likely too late,” is all that he says, still holding his phone. “Scorpius has just been made a member of the Potterpinfoys WhatsApp chat.”

This was the text, Harry supposes. He finds himself lost. “What?”

Draco shrugs, as though to ask what Harry expects. “I’ve informed him that it’s a terrible name. Stay for a drink?”


	7. February, March

Everything continues to unravel, the day of the Slytherin-Ravenclaw match. Ron’s terrier patronus appears in Draco’s upstairs living room, not long after Harry’s agreed to a drink, asking where Harry is and if he’s all right. _“Seems unlikely you’ve been kidnapped, but let us know anyway, yeah? Us nagging’s a peril of the line of work you’re in. They said you weren’t there.”_

Harry’s down half of a very nice lowball wizarding cocktail, which tastes like homey winter fire and makes his fingers tingle to the end. “I love my Ron and Hermione,” he tells Draco as the terrier fades. He’s feeling calmer, and less like the world’s moving too fast.

Draco rolls his eyes, opposite Harry on the other smart settee, a neutral colour too clean to be beige. He looks embarrassed by Harry’s mawkishness, two spots of pink growing on his cheeks.

 _“Sorry,”_ Harry sends back with his stag. _“I had a row with Albus. I’m out clearing my head,”_ he can’t help but hint, implication in his tone, and for some reason this makes Draco burst with incredulous silent laughter, tucked towards his midnight blue shoulder.

He looks gorgeous when he laughs. Harry can’t help watching him.

He’s drinking the same cocktail as Harry, there on the other sofa. If this were a date, Harry thinks, they would be sat next to each other, instead of with two metres between them. If this weren’t a date, the gap between them would feel like social distance. It feels like something crackling and stretched and unspoken. Harry likes that, even if they haven’t agreed what it means.

“You could have told them you were here,” Draco suggests, smirking to point out that Harry’s hint was much too obvious.

“They don’t own me,” is all Harry can think to reply, knocking back another gulp like a rebel.

“Of course they don’t,” Draco indulges the lie, drinking to it with a nod. “So, this attraction to men you’ve developed,” he suggests, before correcting himself. “Sorry,” he says penitently. “Your lust for those packing cock,” he says plainly, flooding Harry with attraction. “Let’s talk about that.”

Flustered, Harry stares at him. Draco stares. Harry waits for the tension to start fizzling out, or for them to suddenly remember who they were at sixteen.

“Er…” For some reason, before he has a chance to realise that this is the perfect opportunity to undertake some wooing, Harry finds words tumbling out of him. “The thing is that my job involves people,” he says, looking down at the table between them, gold and marble, swirling his ice in his drink. “It’s a people-facing job. You have to appraise them, you know,” he says feebly.

“Yes…” slowly Draco agrees.

“You have to figure out how things might’ve happened,” Harry continues, glancing up. He’s sitting with spread knees like an oaf; Draco’s slouched back elegantly and as Harry watches, he casually hooks one leg over the other. “Attractive people can get away with more. So it’s useful,” Harry concludes logically, “to be aware of who’s attractive.”

Really, Harry’s always found this straightforward. He used to get annoyed with other aurors he was working with – the senior wizards – who had no grip on what made a man handsome or compelling to the people around him. For two decades Harry thought that this was simply a skill that he had, to be aware.

“Like you,” Harry finds himself saying in a panic, nonetheless, gesturing with his spare hand and shuffling backwards into the sofa cushions, shutting his legs. “I bet you get away with loads.”

Draco clearly has no intention to interrupt, but his eyes gleam at what Harry realises too late is an unsolicited, unambiguous compliment. Possibly a giveaway of Harry’s suspicions about his profession. His jumper is midnight blue today, and he must know that he looks good, his hair like spun moonlight. “Not as much as I would like,” is all he says, biting his lip for a second before he hides his expression in his drink.

Harry swallows. “Well, I’ve always appraised people. I didn’t think it was strange,” he returns to his thread, looking away. He shouldn’t have called it strange, he realises. “Then we went into lockdown, and I realised that the people I missed most around the Ministry – the clerks and the archivists and people in the lift – they were all fit young men. I’m a perv, it turns out,” he admits, still panicking about it now. The counsellor said that he shouldn’t call himself a perv without defining what he meant. “I like my place of work to be full of nice young things for me to look at.”

“And not that fucking fountain,” Draco mutters, apparently before he can help himself.

And Harry knows that he’s a perv. He found himself imagining what it would be like to take one of the anonymous young men home, when they came back. If they came back. This thought used to make him spiral – but the rest of it was enough to make his stomach churn with guilt, the way it churns now, a year removed.

“But there’s no one on your team?” Draco suggests, as though to let him off the hook.

Distracted, finishing his cocktail, Harry tells him bluntly, “Anyone who fucks with my team’ll find themselves in a disciplinary. I don’t care who they are; I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again.” There’s a reason why Alleridge is Head Auror. There’s a reason why Harry and Percy are good friends, besides the kids: Harry had no idea what to do, and Percy set his promotion back by what’s been five years in order to help him.

He can’t talk about the details of this. He took a Vow, which he wasn’t happy about, but it was the only route open to him. He wasn’t even allowed to tell Ginny, though he said as much as this.

Ginny found it frustrating that the bastard still worked for the Ministry and she wasn’t even allowed to know who he was. They knew people whose kids were starting jobs with the Ministry, she always pointed out. _Victoire wants to work for the Ministry, Harry, for fuck’s sake._

Agreeing with every word Ginny said, Harry found himself regretting telling her anything.

Draco doesn’t ask him for details. “Of course you did,” is what he says, not even sounding impressed. “Let me make you another,” he then says to Harry’s empty, and Harry feels like he’s losing a game. This isn’t Harry’s territory; he’s all out of sorts. Their fingers graze hot as Harry passes the glass over and for some reason Harry stands up.

He sits down.

Unfortunately, before they can get much further into this conversation – much further into this date, Harry thinks, because they were on a date this morning, maybe – Draco’s phone pings, and when he pulls it free from his pocket, the pocket on his arse, which Harry is watching, he says, “Ah.”

“What is it?” Harry asks, looking at the phone. “I need to give the kids my number,” he accepts. He likes the mirrors; they feel personal, and they don’t rely on signal or power. They’re secure.

Wryly, sympathetic, Draco looks at him. “Apparently the Potterpinfoys group was, among other things, an effort by your son to wind up his Gryffindor siblings. It was not well received,” he narrates dryly, “and after an exchange of virtual words your sons are now engaged in a good-old-fashioned Gryfferin row.”

He looks down as the phone pings again.

“Make that a duel,” suggests Draco, wincing.

“I need to go up there,” Harry decides, on his feet again.

“Ah, no,” Draco says, still holding his phone, already on his feet. “The school is very clear that parents are not allowed to turn up as and when they like, especially not to interfere in disciplinary –”

“My sons are duelling each other in the corridors!” And that rule’s never applied to him.

Draco’s phone pings.

 _“Dad?”_ And that’s Lily’s voice, Harry hears, coming from his own back pocket. She sounds tearful – and she looks it, when Harry’s flipped open the case.

She looks twelve years old. She’s thirteen in two months; James and Albus and Lily’s birthdays are all in the first half of May. Ron once made a joke about Harry and Ginny only having sex on their birthdays, but it’s coincidence, really; they used to have sex a lot.

“Dad, are you going to marry Mr Malfoy?” Lily’s demanding, white-faced and desperate, with no sense of reason or proportion, unaware that he and Ginny will need to stay married for another eighteen months. The idea’s for the whole thing to be quiet. “Are you a Slytherin now? I don’t want us to be a Slytherin family!”

Harry doesn’t know what to say. “What?” is all he says. Lily’s grown up with same-sex marriage quite normal, he supposes. It’s nice, if confusing right now. He was expecting his children to call him a liar and a bastard and – gay, if he’s honest. Everything was gay in Teddy’s primary school, for an odd phase when he was nine or ten. Not _gay_ gay, he used to say, innocently. Just gay.

Teddy’s grandmother wasn’t impressed. Lily wasn’t quite born, when Teddy turned ten. Harry doubts that Teddy remembers it.

In the mirror, Lily keeps panicking, and for once Harry sees himself.

He sits down. Draco finishes making him a drink, which is suspicious; he sets it at Harry’s side before he leaves the room. There’s a slender golden stirrer in the glass, Harry realises, the end of which is a snake, and he doesn’t know why he’s surprised. He flicks two fingers to the doorway where his daughter can’t see, and he thinks that he hears the cackle of a satisfied laugh.

“I’m a lion and you’re a lion,” Harry insists, feeling distracted, too warm. He focuses on Lily’s tearful face. “That’ll never change. We’re a Slytherin family because of your brother, yeah?” he remembers, contradicting himself.

“I don’t understand!” Lily complains, and that’ll be because Harry’s not making sense.

“Let’s get this sorted, right?” Harry chides himself, trying to remember how this works when he’s not in the field. “Potters United. Are your brothers still duelling?” He thinks he hears them shouting at each other. “Lily, you need to get a teacher; I don’t care if they’ve told you… I’m your dad, so I trump them –”

He feels proud of himself for not telling his twelve-year-old daughter to run towards the conflict and cast _Expelliarmus_.

Somehow Harry wrangles his children into a Potterpin conference, talking Lily down while James and Albus get their bollocking from an increasingly ancient Filius Flitwick, points taken on both sides.

He calls Teddy for moral support, because he does that; it is what it is. Arthur once told him that he used to do the same thing with Bill, and Bill’s turned out all right.

Naturally, the first thing Teddy says is that they could do this much better on Zoom. He ends up playing the badger, nonetheless, and his mediation’s even-handed, so it results in Harry sharing with the group that he does indeed have romantic designs on Scorpius’s father and he’s bisexual now; he always was. He doesn’t see this as something which has much affected his life; he didn’t have any serious relationships before Mum, and all it means now is that his friendship with Mr Malfoy might become something else, but he’s their dad, isn’t he? He’s old and only looking for companionship, really, like something from a PG film.

“Like Mum and Professor Gnomeo,” Albus points out unhelpfully.

“And I’ve got a phone now,” Harry says, glaring at his green-eyed son. “So it might be nice to have a group. You can send me pictures of your essays and stuff. I’m not allowed to take it into work –”

“There are so many other people in the world, Dad,” James complains, as though Harry must now want sex from all of them.

“– but I’ll always have the mirrors if you need me.”

James is pushing his glasses up his nose, unaware of how obvious it is when he thinks about sex. For a year now it’s been most of the time. “Just get an app if you’ve got a phone,” he says, and Harry’s not sure he’s got the point.

“Don’t get an app,” insists Teddy, making a face.

“I think this is brilliant,” says Albus, but this is mostly about the others’ reactions.

Lily is hiding her face, fiercely gripping in her enormous cuddly pikachu. She makes a short sound, and Harry’s frozen to realise that it’s a sob.

“I know that there are other people in the world,” Harry tries to explain. “And Lily, don’t… I’m still me?” She sobs again, breaking Harry’s heart. “We have a lot in common,” he tries to explain to his sons. This might be true. “We were bumping into each other. We’ve not even decided that we’re dating.”

Not yet into any of this, Albus chokes. “ _Dating?_ ” he demands, screwing up his face as though he would prefer Harry and Draco to be making two-word text arrangements for rough, unspeaking sex.

“Oh, Merlin’s beard, Dad,” Teddy complains, pressing fingers to his temple as though Harry is impossible to believe. “Get a grip.”

Harry looks towards the doorway, not sure where Draco’s gone. The house is all marble and wood and metal; warm, soft colours; black and white and gold, which he never would have thought would be Draco. “We might be dating,” he says, because he’s very nearly sure. He’s convinced, “No one called it that when I was your age.”

Looking over his shoulder is a mistake, nonetheless, because James sounds utterly scandalised, as though Harry’s smoking a cigar in his dressing gown, not wearing an easy cotton shirt and trousers that fit, a jumper that Molly didn’t knit him. “Are you at his right now?”

Albus peers into the mirror. “That’s the Malfoys’ drawing room –”

Lily sobs, not raising her face, and then the connection’s broken on the mirror.

“James, will you look after Lils –”

In the end, Harry decides that he needs to talk to Ginny again on the floo. It doesn’t feel right to do that from Draco’s. Before he leaves, he and Draco end up chatting in the hallway, leaning against the wall and Harry would like to say into each other. Harry’s apologising for everything, his own shit parenting most of all. Draco’s shrugging, like he’s seen it all before.

“Sign them up to the Dark Lord’s campaign of terror and we can talk,” Draco suggests, reminding him, reaching out to squeeze Harry’s left arm – not the one with the burn. He sweeps down his hand to Harry’s elbow, now too warm in his jumper.

Suddenly Harry remembers what he came here to do. Trying not to think too much about it, he reaches to pluck at the folds of Draco’s midnight-blue collar, all soft knitting –

“What?” Draco asks him, surprised.

– and he leans entirely into him, kissing him goodbye. It’s little more than their mouths briefly touching together, but it’s warm and soft and it sounds like a _click_ when Harry pulls back. It’s a kiss. It’s Harry’s first with someone other than Ginny since over a year before they got together. It makes his heart flutter violently, and there’s a lightning bolt slicing up his face.

“That’s you on a par with Cho Chang,” Harry tells Draco, summoning his hat and Barbour from the cupboard. He says it because he finds the thought amusing and there are no other thoughts in his head. His palms are sweating.

Forty years old, Draco Malfoy looks nonplussed. “What was that for?” he asks as Harry puts on his coat, his expression paused and not complex, as though he might also be out of his depth.

Harry’s waiting for him to report that Cho’s divorced whoever it was at her wedding and come out as gay. “You’ll have to figure it out,” Harry decides, because a line is needed, suppressing a laugh and feeling like he’s winning again. He pats Draco’s warm chest twice, to be patronising and because it feels nice, pulls down the brim of his hat and takes his leave through the front door to disapparate.

* * *

When Harry goes to bed that night, he lets himself dream. There’s a future ahead of him, he thinks; he thinks that he sees what it is. There’s a lot of smut.

Waking up in the morning, it turns out that it’s Valentine’s Day. Reading the paper, looking at the date – in a fervour of romance, pathetically – Harry decides to buy a card and send it Draco, no matter that no one does this anymore. This was how people expressed their romantic designs when they were both in school. He feels certain that it was.

It’s been nearly a year and there’s still news about Covid-19. It’s like the weather, Harry thinks, flicking past the pages. There’s a symbol to tell him what’s happening on the home screen of his phone. For now, he ignores it.

A little more awake, after a shower, he tells himself that he’s sending a card to mess with Draco’s head, actually, and when he’s at the newsagent he buys the most hideous example he can find, all glitter and balloons and kissing bears. The bears are getting more action than they are, and Harry wonders if he’s being passive aggressive.

He always goes slightly too far. The size of the card is A4.

The newsagent gives him a look, buying the card. Harry gives him a look back, feeling like a secret agent in his mask.

 _YOUR SECRET ADMIRER,_ he even signs the card in quasi-anonymous stalkerish block capitals and he doesn’t give a shit, he decides as he gives it to Spearow to deliver to Mopsy the elf.

Less than an hour later, around midday, Draco appears at the door of number 12, Grimmauld Place, not wearing a coat so his nose and his cheeks have gone pink. His jumper’s a deep, dark green. Harry arrives in the hallway, alerted by Kreacher before the door lets Draco in.

Draco says nothing, entering the house, turning into Harry’s space and barrelling him in retreat towards number 12’s coats, mostly Teddy’s, Harry’s head to the side of the hooks. His hand is spread to push him by the diaphragm, palm and fingers; it’s a bit intense.

“You all right –?” Harry’s trying to focus down his nose, on Draco’s sharp eyes. The walls around them are conveniently Valentine pink.

“I’m on my way into work,” Draco’s telling him, but Harry’s not paying attention.

Because he’s being kissed, then, much like a bear, and he’s not focused on anything, his palms sweating with the immediate leap of his heart, Draco’s elbows sharp where he finds himself gripping them.

Breaking the kiss, Draco pulls back to look at Harry down his pale nose – but Harry pulls him fully into his arms and Draco’s kissing him again, more deeply, smelling expensive, grinning and huffing like this is something he’s been imagining, his jumper soft and warm around the shape of his back, his mouth soft and warm and unexpected, his body stronger than Harry imagined.

Harry’s being crowded into the wall, the squish of Teddy’s coats, and he knows what Draco’s waiting for. He lets himself feel it, opening his mouth, crushing them together by the waist. Everything becomes incomprehensible, though intellectually Harry knows that it’s Draco’s tongue which turns his mouth into a sexual organ, makes him sweat hotter and makes things between his legs swell.

Loosely, Draco’s holding the hook by Harry’s head, protecting him from clonking against it; Harry butts into the fingers until they’re scratching through his hair the way he likes. He finds the back of Draco’s head, cradling it, stroking hair with his thumb, not seeing a single pot of gold at the end of any rainbow, but everything he dreamed of in his foolish youth set aside, a different dream set in its place, where there’s this and long walks and slow evenings –

Something doesn’t feel right, an instinct far away – but before Harry can acknowledge it or get ahead of himself, take things further, he’s startled out of the kiss by a clatter and a crash and a clunk, which turns out to be a picture frame smashing on the floor and Teddy’s phone being dropped, but hopefully not broken. “Fuck!”

Teddy’s only clumsy on occasion, but when he is it tends to be catastrophic.

He’s pulling his lime green dressing gown tightly around him and his neon pink t-shirt, his skinny legs exposed and his slippers ancient, possibly Pokémon-themed, two daft-looking ducks – because they’re a Pokémon family, Teddy’s informed him. How has it taken him so many years to catch on?

“ _Dad,_ ” Teddy’s swearing, scandalised and embarrassed, apparently, that Harry’s let Cousin Draco see him like this. Also that they’re snogging. He’s wide-eyed and ducking carefully to pick up his phone, pull his wand from his pocket to fix the picture, an abstract; set it back on the wall. “Don’t make out in shared parts of the house!”

Draco’s laughing, his nose and cheeks a softer pink than the walls, and he’s biting his lip. “My Lord Mountbatten,” he insists on calling Teddy, supercilious. “How wonderful to see you.”

“Cousin Draco,” grits out Teddy, bright red and not meeting his eyes.

“Is this what you’re wearing?” Draco comments on the outfit, quick. “Everyone’s coming to lunch.”

“Lunch?”

February wind is rushing in through the door, though it closes when Harry gives it a look. Around them, the hallway is a warm, cheerful pink, which Harry picked though everyone thinks it was Ginny.

They’re not moving apart from each other, Harry and Draco, and Harry’s aware of what’s between his legs and what’s been pressing into him. They’re neither of them stiff enough to sit on, but they are quietly, wonderfully compromised.

“Er, hang on; this is not a shared house,” Harry remembers, tucked up in Teddy’s puffy coats. He tries not to be embarrassed, because he used to clean up Teddy’s bum. He has a feeling that he might be turning pink. “And there’s no lunch,” he corrects quickly, rolling his eyes; “he’s being a dick…”

Draco laughs again and Harry realises that this is the wrong word to use.

“This is my house,” Harry insists, meeting Teddy’s amber eyes. Teddy fits in perfectly here, where the walls are colourful like magic. “You live here in my totalitarian state,” he says nonetheless, for the joke.

“Well, I’m here to smash the state!” immediately Teddy retorts, affronted, looking between them and blushing again, maybe sussing out why they’re not moving, though Harry hopes not. His arms tighten across his dressing gown and he’s clutching his phone. “I was not aware that enfranchisement meant living in some sort of knocking shop!” he finally declares, defaulting to sounding like Andromeda before he sweeps away to dash up the stairs in a clatter. He sounds quite a lot like Draco’s impression of his mother, just without the voice.

Draco’s sniggering. Before Harry can look, he’s tucking their noses together. “I’m really am heading into work,” he apologises, nudging, kissing Harry quickly again.

He makes Harry feel young like he never was, though the odd instinct’s not gone away. “It’s Sunday,” Harry reminds him. “I sent you a Valentine’s card.”

“You did?” Draco flirts with him, pretending. “Which one? I’ve had a hundred.”

In rebuke, Harry drops an arm to pull him close by the arse, annoyed to find an iPhone in the way.

And now, as reality intrudes, Harry finds that it intrudes the way it always does. Not abruptly – always with forewarning, just not forewarning that he thought it was necessary to heed.

Not realising, as it’s happening, Harry’s focused on Draco’s arse and his phone, the feeling of intimacy as he gropes the thing from its pocket, warm metal, the heat of Draco’s eyes as he takes it from his hand.

“I’m on my way into work,” Draco tells him a third time, as though he’s prepared what to say.

Harry looks at him, hoiking him close so that they can feel what they’ve done to each other; Draco’s face flushes and his grey eyes are a much deeper colour than usual.

He’s looking at Harry as though he only makes life difficult. “I’m fairly certain that I’m about to be put on a portkey.”

He makes Harry think of Christmas, when he was away. “For how long?” Harry finds himself asking dully, still squeezing him in.

“They do this,” Draco’s saying seriously, never saying who. His expression is telling Harry that he isn’t joking at all.

Gritting his jaw, Harry accepts that he’s being afforded a trust. The walls around them remain a warm pink.

“They refuse to offer warning and they never let one pack,” Draco’s explaining, a touch of his usual ironic, complaining tone. “There’s a pattern,” he calls himself brilliant, because this will be how he’s learned to see it coming.

“How long will you be away?” Harry asks, letting Draco pull back so that they can look at each other properly.

His demeanour and expression are guarded. He sighs. “It should only be a couple of weeks,” he says, before he shuts his eyes and shakes his head, as though egging himself on not to lie. “The longest I’ve been gone was a year,” he says solidly, quick eyes on Harry’s own.

With a huff of breath, Harry finds himself incredulous. “The whole world can change in a year,” is what he says.

“It wasn’t my sexuality that finished it with Astoria,” Draco’s suddenly confessing and it’s rushed, not right at all. His expression settles into disgust. “They can take me for as long as they like.”

Part of Harry doesn’t understand. It’s Sunday; it’s Valentine’s Day. It’s 2021. The walls around them are Valentine pink.

Most of him sees that there’s nothing he can do. It’s always a surprise, how quickly he adapts. How much he regrets the lost time before.

For a moment, Draco squeezes shut his eyes, looking old and scarred from more than what they did as teenagers when he blinks. “I’m a shit,” he promises, his tone not sitting right. It’s too vulnerable. He sniffs once and Harry can’t bear it.

“You’re not a shit –” Harry says, still reacting to what’s being said, his sweating hands full of soft knitting again, dark green, to take his arms.

“You’ve always known that I’m a shit,” Draco’s telling him, flip-flopping, contradicting himself. “I’m a shit for a living. It won’t be that long…”

Teddy’s only just gone upstairs.

“What happens to Scorpius?” Harry asks, playing with Draco’s collar, his heart breaking for that boy –

“He knows that when he stops receiving texts, he’s to contact my parents.” Draco’s swallowing from guilt, and it likely seemed less, when he was young and there was Astoria at home, fiddling with doilies or whatever Draco left her to do. “He knows how he’s to behave. I’m not allowed to warn him.” There’s heat in his eyes, yet again. “I should not be warning you.”

Harry looks down, and he finds himself vowing, out of time, “One day they’ll make me Head Auror.” Then he’s holding Draco’s jaw, because his own happiness was never why he took his job, and it was a snap decision the first time too. “Yeah?” he demands that Draco listens to his promise, sweeping a thumb.

It might be five years before Alleridge retires – it might be more – but Harry’s been asked if he’s putting his hat into the ring, and he’s been putting it off. He’s been putting everything off. As Head Auror, he’ll be allowed to know.

Ginny once asked if he would ever give up the promotion track, if not his job. His leg was missing at the time. It was a short conversation, in which Harry said that he didn’t want to, and Ginny said that that was fine.

“We don’t need to talk about this,” Harry tells Draco, when Draco looks up. He shouldn’t be putting himself in this danger; they’ll adapt. “Scorpius can always stay here instead of with your parents –”

For a second, something cracks, and Draco hisses through his teeth. The words he says are hard like stone, “They really are fucking shits –”

“He’s a Potterpinfoy now,” Harry tries to joke, trying not to think about his crying daughter.

Complaining again, arch, “That _cannot_ be the name…” Draco rolls his eyes, looking down. He sounds vulnerable. “Maybe next year.”

They’re in Harry’s pink hallway, somehow. Teddy was just here and it’s Valentine’s Day. Harry’s just been snogged, for the first time in what feels like so long. For what has been so long. And now things have changed.

“I’m not asking…” Draco’s tone is sorrowful, and Harry doesn’t understand it. They were supposed to be taking things slow. This is what he told himself. “I’m not asking for sacrifices to be made,” he says. He’s still relying on his prepared speech, frowning. Harry thinks he means that Harry can sleep around on him, if he likes, which is an absurd thing for him to suggest. “But you sent me a card, so I thought that maybe…” He looks up. “You cannot tell anyone that I came here to say –”

Harry kisses him before he can say it, palming up the nape of his neck, the brush of his hair.

Draco’s phone pings in his hand, and it’s a different ping from when he gets a text from his son.

Looking at Harry with too much like something he never felt when they were young, Draco breathes. “I lied about why I got the phone,” he confesses, and Harry’s certain that it’s enough to get him sacked. Maybe the thing other than expelled. The wizarding world tends to extremes.

Harry feels like a senior auror when he kisses him hard on the mouth and shoves him away. “I’ll be here, Valentine,” he commands him like a junior officer, shoving him high on the back towards the door, which opens. “Get the fuck on with what you’re supposed to be doing.”

Draco’s gone seconds later, head ducked to leave through the door before he disapparates into nothing on the step, without sound.

Harry looks at his phone for something to do with his hands, which want something to hold. He taps into the weather and it might rain today. A text arrives without a ping – as if by magic – but it’s only a notification, no number revealed. _Will do, HP._ He double taps to see if there’s more, but then it’s gone.

He looks up at the front door. It shuts.

He doesn’t know what he’s got himself into.

“Teddy!” he bellows into the house, turning and pulling away from the coats. His voice fills all six floors.

As intended, this brings Teddy rattling downstairs. He looks hastily dressed, as though just in case. “What? What is it? What’s the matter?”

Harry’s shaking his head. He was like this sometimes, in the first few years after the war. He needed everyone he loved close around him, and if Ginny wanted his hand up her robes, he decided, what better way to keep her close? “Stay where I can see you,” he orders Teddy now, and he knows that he’s being a shit. “We’re having lunch. Kreacher!” he shouts, because he needs Kreacher too.

“Dad, are you all right?”

“I’ll just text Hermione,” Harry decides, looking down at his phone, where her number is one of the few he has saved. “Her and Ron are coming round for lunch. I ditched ‘em yesterday; it was rude.”

“Dad, Aunt Ginny always said that when you’re like this you should breathe and count to five, breathe out and do it again.” The last time this happened, Teddy can’t have been older than ten, maybe twelve. Harry stopped bringing things home after that, in part. “You have to look at me, you know, Dad; look.”

Harry blinks and looks up at his godson, standing there in the hall, his eyes amber bright, his hair azure blue.

He looks down at his phone. He’s sent three texts to Hermione, all three of which are nonsense, jumbled autocorrects with too many conjunctions and prepositions.

“Dad, what –?” Teddy asks him, looking worried and confused.

 _Harry?_ a text comes through.

Another few seconds, and with a _crack_ and a _pop_ Ron and Hermione have apparated into his hallway, and they’ve not done this to each other for years. The change in pressure used to wake up James, even floors away, and it was always unsustainably codependent.

Harry finds himself staring at them, worrying the inside of his finger where his wedding ring used to be.

“Harry, mate, what’s happened?” Ron’s asking, frowning to look at him.

“Teddy, what’s wrong?” Hermione locates a more reliable source.

“I don’t know,” Teddy’s saying, sounding worried but always in possession of his father’s sangfroid, at times like this. Though, really, Harry remembers, when push came to shove in domestic situations Remus Lupin was an anxious mess. “He was snogging Cousin Draco in the coats, and then I went upstairs, and then he was like this.”

“Oh,” says Hermione in a voice like she’s joining the dots.

“Good for you, mate,” Ron suggests, confused.

“We’re having lunch,” Harry insists, counting them up. He misses his children, his ex-wife, Draco Malfoy. Dead people, who are difficult to count. “Kreacher, do we have things in for lunch?” he asks his elf.

“Of course, Master Harry,” Kreacher, affronted, insists. He would insist on this whether they had things in or not. “And there is beer.” This at least is true. There’s always beer in the house, these days.

* * *

When Harry fell in love with Ginny, it felt like it took longer, but it likely took less time than this: six months of the Hogwarts school year. That feels like such a short time now, at forty years of age. The next few weeks almost feel like a short time too.

Harry’s busy, after all. He arrives at work on Monday to news that there’s been a shift in the techy potions case – and Harry nods, reporting to Alleridge to explain what he needs clearance to do, because he hasn’t asked for permission in years, if he ever did.

It’s a good thing, he thinks, that aurors and unspeakables will never cede command to each other, or his relationship with Draco would be fucked. Harry realises this, when his thoughts are clear. There’d be no ethical waffling, if Harry wrote Draco’s orders. He wouldn’t accept it of a superior and he wouldn’t accept it of himself, which means that they’d be done. It’s a good thing, really, that he has no idea what individual unspeakables are doing at any one time.

He’s been gaining insight into the work for the past few years. The unspeakables report with one voice in these situations, presented through a liaison while Harry speaks for himself. He feels increasingly suspicious that the liaison might be someone he’s been best friends with since the age of eleven, but he can never remember, once he’s left the room. The muggles are jovial when he calls them for a meeting; he and they know each other’s names. The muggles sign contracts instead of making vows; it’s quaint.

Harry works for the Ministry of Magic. He makes an Unbreakable Vow before Monday morning’s confidential meeting and he enters a room. He’s briefed and briefs in return before he sets to work with memos, mostly, which magic will always keep more secure than any other form of encryption. He has a team and he tells them what to do, but mostly he’s working from his office. Reports flutter in and more meetings are set, the messages for his eyes only, anonymous. Harry signs the responses _HP_ , because the DMLE supposedly answers to the public, policing with the public’s consent.

It’s unpleasant business, most of what the unspeakables get up to. They’re professional shits. There are targets who are being manipulated, blackmailed, seduced to make way for the aurors’ intervention. Harry wasn’t used to it before and the unspeakables weren’t used to him. The other aurors and the liaison used to laugh at how often he said, _That’s not good enough,_ but he wasn’t joking, not a single time. He doesn’t joke now.

He doesn’t ask them kindly if they might not do it again. He expects them to consult him before they take any significant extra-legal action, and he makes clear that he is not fucking around, whether it’s Hermione he bullies or not.

If Harry’s ever made Head Auror, he sees now, it will be a particular kind of head. Another senior auror will take on the glad-handing and commanding the plods, the old-world wizarding jobs, the way that Harry’s taken on this. He’s relieved to let himself imagine it, because he’s never liked the look of what Alleridge does, and ------- before was worse than a shit.

The muggles’ version of this work seems impersonal – less seedy. That might be just how it looks. The wizarding world is small both in Britain and across the globe, so there’s rarely anonymity when wizards and witches meet face to face: it’s people dealing with people who think they know each other, but they don’t.

 _Slytherin House is about games within games within games,_ Harry hears someone say in his head, and Harry’s not surprised to find out that Blaise Zabini is one of the marks for what he might know, though he’s not directly involved in criminal activity. Draco won’t go directly to him, either.

It takes shits to deal with shits, and at the age of eighteen Harry would never have thought to employ them. At the age of forty, the same as eighteen, Harry might end up owing them his life. He’ll only go into the field after everything has been put in place, but he’ll go there, and he’ll go looking, on a raid for maybe potions or servers with his team. Criminals are pragmatic; they’re never hung up on their principles, let alone the Statute of Secrecy, apart from as much as it benefits them. Harry’s job for now is to make sure that the Ministry doesn’t become them, because he believes in the DMLE.

He feels like a teacher from the 1960s, telling all these Ministry Slytherins, _That’s not good enough; try harder. HP_ Sometimes it’s prefaced by, _Here’s my feedback:_ , because this is what’s been requested of him.

The kids receive such nicely structured feedback in school. At least a shit sandwich, if not a set of bullets.

This is reality, as much as it’s his. And he misses Draco, Harry finds in these weeks, becoming himself, if that’s what he is, keeping people alive, spending his evenings alone when he has them. He misses him like Hedwig, like his parents, like Diagon Alley when he was a child. The eighties and nineties before the two-thousands were born. Ginny. There’s a word for that, he knows. It feels like nostalgia, most of all, which means at least part of it is undeserved.

When Harry comes home to number 12 – now and again – he catches up with Teddy and he laughs and he speaks to his other children, texts them emojis, though he doesn’t see them now for the Hogsmeade weekend. He cooks with Kreacher and cleans, refusing to let Kreacher take on the bathrooms, rattling between the brightly coloured rooms of his house.

“Leave the cobwebs; I’ll sort them in the morning,” he tries to insist. He’s been insisting this for a week.

“Master Harry is expiring on his feets!” Kreacher stubbornly replies.

“I’ll sort them, Kreacher; I said and you agreed –”

Kreacher clicks his fingers and the cobwebs are gone, but it’s the magical effort, the emotional labour… “There were no spiderwebs Kreacher saw.”

“Kreacher, I said –”

They have many rows.

And it’s domestic. But when Harry goes to bed, he goes over things, embraced by the warm yellow walls, the soft cream sheets. He’s exhausted and stressed and being domestic is stressful because he’s making this up; he’s never had a home like this. The burn on his arm itches like hell and he wants to sleep – he wants to walk through a door and away.

Sometimes, in the months before lockdown, over the years, Harry would sleep in Ron and Hermione’s spare room like a suitor or a child, rather than end a long day at work by facing the domestic bliss of his house.

“I thought that it would change,” said Ginny after counselling one day, when they’d both been made to face it. “I thought that it would be different. I remember it being different. Everything changes, so why wouldn’t this? Why won’t you ever let me in?”

“It’s not about letting you in, Gin,” Harry told her, not looking at himself as he changed. “It’s about whether or not you’re here.”

He was being a dick. He flares up when he feels threatened. It’s a useful reaction when people who hate him are trying to kill him.

If anyone asked, Harry’s sure he’d say that he wouldn’t want to be involved with someone who’s involved in his work. Besides the basic ethical problem, his home is a sanctuary, an escape. There’s no true escape from reality, Harry’s well aware, but he also knows that incompatible ideas can co-exist.

It’s funny, Harry thinks, waking up from dreams of horcruxes, not shaving enough so his beard comes in a bit – and his children know that he won’t pay attention to what they’re saying when he’s _beardy_ , as Ginny used to explain it when they were young – he always remembers tracing Ginny’s dot in the woods. He thought it so romantic, for so long.

“Yes,” Ginny told him smartly during lockdown, though this isn’t what he did. She was only wearing one of his quidditch shirts – a shirt from one of her old teams, just big. She was tightening her ponytail on her head. “And when you were finished wanking you would put the map away.”

As the raid comes together in 2021, Harry’s nightmares get worse, because he knows that he’ll be fighting next week, next year, into the 2030s if he doesn’t end up dead. He doesn’t like these choices, between reality and ignorant bliss. He’s not sure what else there is.


	8. March, April

It’s well into March before Draco comes home. A raid, sketched out by Harry before it’s passed to technicians – before he leads it – achieves a moderate success and pushes back some of the virtual trenches they’re facing. He gains no new scars. It’s a week before the Easter holidays, for which Harry makes the children promise that they’ll come home. Teddy seems to put some sort of fear of Merlin into them, because they all dutifully agree that they will.

A note comes through to Harry, and it’s a lot like they’re playing a game.

_HP, it’s been too long. Take me out._

It makes Harry laugh and swallow with relief and everything about this is fucked up, he thinks, but he’s thrown in his hat, now, at work. He never does anything the right way, and sometimes life has to take the shape that there’s space for.

He tells Teddy that he’s going over to Draco’s. He’s entirely gaslit his godson about what happened on Valentine’s Day, telling him that he, Harry, was the one who told Draco that they needed to cool things for a bit because he was going to be busy at work, no matter that there was no way Harry should have known this until the next day. “I need to apologise and catch up, you know.”

“Ugh, Dad; just tell me you’re going out,” is Teddy’s response now he’s seen them snogging, and he seems to be coping all right. He’s texting on his phone.

Harry apparates to Draco’s step in his Barbour and the browner of his hats, wearing wellies, waiting for Mopsy to open the door.

“Hello Mopsy,” he greets the happy-looking elf. She must be happy to have Draco home. It’s been weeks for her, fiddling with doilies.

She squeaks, “Auror Potter! Hello!” Kreacher’s right that she’s inexperienced. Not that she’s a disgrace.

“I’ve come to take Draco on a walk.”

Draco’s emerging from upstairs, looking cautious and perfect and slim, like a dream. He’s wearing maroon red today. Harry’s all muscle and vinegar, receding greying hair.

Remembering something, Harry draws his wand and conjures a pair of black wellies, which he bought when he was indulging his pash, dotless, slightly off his head from lack of sleep at three in the afternoon, maybe ten days ago or two weeks. A memo from Herpes told him that he was banned from the Ministry for eight hours, for rest, before promptly ejecting him from the building.

“I bought him these,” Harry tells Mopsy, only glancing up when Draco looks at him. “Thank you for telling me the right size.” Mopsy made him cucumber sandwiches, that day.

“That’s no problem for Mopsy, Auror Potter!” Mopsy tells him, taking the boots, which were more expensive than Harry’s, but not the most expensive he could find. Because they’re _wellies_.

“He should be embarrassed to wear them, really,” Harry keeps telling the elf. “He needs to have walked a bit more of the countryside. Snogged in a few bushes. D’you know what I mean?”

At this, Mopsy clearly doesn’t know what to say and can’t look at him.

“That’ll do, Mopsy,” Draco lets her off the hook, his nod sharp.

Still holding the wellingtons, Mopsy disapparates with a _pop_. The boots will end up in the cupboard, Harry assumes.

“Harry,” chides Draco, his hallway empty of coats. They’re all in the cupboard. He’s looking at Harry without caution, only humour in his eyes. “You’re embarrassing my elf.”

The boots pop back, because poor Mopsy’s confused.

Harry grins to look at them, to look up, because his heart’s in his throat and he’s playing a game, till the next time. “Valentine, you’re back,” he greets facetiously. “You were gone weeks.”

With a flick of Draco’s wand and a wrinkle of his nose, the front door’s closed, and Draco’s not snogging him in bushes, he’s kissing him here in the hall, embracing Harry tight as though he thought they’d let each other go.

“I’m taking you on a walk,” Harry reminds him, hands full of deep red knitting, always nervous to be held.

“Not for now, you’re not,” is Draco’s much too perfect reply. He smells better than Harry remembered. It’s nice to wrap his arms around him – oddly familiar from before, nostalgic, and it’s too easy to fall into a second long kiss.

They’re interrupted when Draco’s phone pings. It’s Scorpius’s ping, and he won’t have heard from his father for a month. Harry’s not mentioned Draco’s absence to Albus and Albus hasn’t mentioned it to him, but it’s never clear whether they’re loyal to each other as father and son.

Draco’s typing replies; his phone pings again.

“I’ll make you a drink,” Harry suggests, squeezing his arm and pecking his jaw, as a test. Draco smiles, texting, turning in towards the kiss, and Harry has no idea what he’s doing, both of them aware that they’re playing a farce. “You could come over to mine?”

Glancing up, Draco’s expression is sunny, in absolute terms but especially for someone who spent fifteen years as a closeted adulterer. “We’re going on a walk,” he promises Harry, his eyes promising more, so oddly quirky and genuine, like he’s forgotten that he’s committed to playing a snake.

Harry’s forgotten that this is where they were, a place with glittery bears. They're dating, he supposes, but the word doesn't feel special enough; it feels too real.

“Spring’s coming in and I have my new boots, don’t I?” Draco finishes.

He’s saying thank you for his present, and Harry’s heart skips. He didn’t realise that this was what he was buying him; the only thought in his head was that Draco needed boots.

Draco’s phone pings and he looks down.

Harry turns him around by the shoulders and pushes him towards the drawing room upstairs, managing him like he’s incompetent. It’s an excellent excuse to follow closely behind him and think about sex, feel up his shoulders and imagine him shirtless, muscles flexing as he touches his way through a wardrobe of different-coloured cashmere jumpers.

His hair smells like he’s spent the past month on holiday, of sea salt and something like sun cream.

 _And that’s how I’ll imagine it,_ Harry thinks.

“Mopsy,” Harry asks the house, and Mopsy apparates to the black-and-white landing at the top of the stairs. “I’d like to make Draco a drink,” he suggests, and Draco’s texting. Harry’s running knuckles up and down his spine, through red. “What should I make?”

“Auror Potter, I’ll show you!” Mopsy insists, not seeing Harry’s fingers.

Harry lets her. “Just once,” he insists.

He kisses Draco on the neck when Mopsy’s not looking, nose in his hair again, nudging down the collar of his maroon jumper.

He finds the slightest nick of scar tissue before the collar stops stretching. It’s is a surprise, though Harry knows that it shouldn’t be. He knows not to ask. Imagining Draco’s body again, for the first time at this age, Harry imagines that he might be muscle and vinegar too.

When Mopsy’s made them drinks, showing Harry how, Draco pats the settee next to him. It’s neutral in colour and looks expensive, just like Harry remembers. “Sit,” Draco commands, still looking at his phone, now holding out his arm. “You can read them; it’s fine.”

Sitting, Harry indulges himself, settling into Draco’s arm which he’s set out as a hook. He curls up, kicking off his wellies which are entirely out of place in Draco’s drawing room, against the rich and pale golds of the broad carpet. He takes off his coat and sets it over the sofa’s back; Mopsy pops both things away.

Braced for Harry to slouch into, Draco plays with Harry’s hair and lets the ice melt in his drink on the table, stealing Harry’s for a sip from time to time.

Harry dozes, exhausted, relaxing to the point that Draco’s taking the drink and he’s gone – oh yes, because he hasn’t been sleeping –

* * *

It’s not clear how Draco’s texting. Harry looks down when a ping wakes him up. The first drink’s finished, the glass held loosely in Draco’s hand, his arm lolled around Harry’s shoulders, but somehow he’s at it with one thumb and a message pops higher up the screen.

Sitting round, Harry swaps the empty glass for the one on the marble table before settling back into the quiet. Another ping, and he looks down again. It’s clear that Draco’s iPhone is more magical than anything else. Scorpius’s texts are coming in as long gossipy chat which Harry never would have expected, about people whom Harry can’t be sure he knows. They’re talking about Albus – so much about Albus that Harry’s sure Albus wouldn’t want him to know. He’s in a feud with one of the other fourth-year boys, it looks like. The other boy has cronies, inevitably. Albus has Scorpius, his wits and Draco’s advice, filtered through the phone to his son.

When Draco replies, he taps his thumb, but the keyboard is ever shifting, words appearing in maps to lead Draco quickly through long sentences without ever coming up short or twining into gobbledegook. He’d be even quicker with both thumbs, maybe, but for now it seems like one is enough. Harry sips the second drink, watered down by melted ice, and Draco’s other hand finds its way into Harry’s receding hair.

“I’m not a pet, you know,” Harry points out, slumping lower into the crook of him.

“Yes you are,” Draco tells him, contrary, his fingers sending shivers down Harry’s spine. “Shush.”

Harry snorts, relaxing again.

Another ping sounds from Draco’s phone and Harry glances down –

– but he finds his eyes crossing, blinded by light, and it hurts, he jolts away, splashing himself and the smart settee. “Merlin’s beard; fuck!”

Two taps, which Harry half-hears, maybe feels the vibration of, and he senses more than sees Draco toss the phone across to the other sofa before he turns towards him. “Where does it hurt?” he’s demanding, short, not sounding like himself, taking Harry by the jaw and lifting his chin. “Is it still hurting?”

Harry shakes his head, concentrating through the lingering pain. For a second he was sure that this was both his eyes gone, but the shapes of the room are coming back to him around the bright light. A breath comes in as a sniff.

“Shh-hh,” Draco says, scratching fingers into his hair and kissing him while he’s still blinking – removing the glass to the table where it skitters hard. “That was me,” he apologises. “I wasn’t thinking.” He’s talking about letting Harry read his texts.

“You were talking to Scorpius,” Harry reminds him, retinas burnt bright behind his eyelids and when he tries to see Draco’s face, and again.

Draco’s kissing him better, making Harry complain against his mouth; he’s assessing the noises, Harry’s response – it’s so clear. “I’ve sent too many texts,” he says, breathing, likely covered in unspeakable scars; Harry plucks at his collar, because the knitting is soft. “I get a warning and they investigate, but they always say it’s fine.”

“You sent me a text,” Harry remembers, wondering why magic’s always hurt him so much. “Does that mean I’m special?”

As it is, Draco huffs, perfect. “Don’t ask stupid questions,” he demands, before pressing his way into Harry’s mouth. Harry pulls an arm around his shoulders.

Eventually, they go on a walk. For most of it they’re holding hands. For the rest of it Harry’s backed against a tree.

“D’you know what I love about it being 2021?” Harry tells Draco at the end of this walk, with no need for the pub because there’s Harry’s beer at home. The thought has come on him spontaneously, now, but it originally came on him when he was buying Draco’s boots.

“What do you love about it being 2021?” Draco asks him with a sigh in his wellies and Harry’s brown hat, his cashmere coat.

Harry grins at him, because he decided this when Draco was away and he was dreaming, and now it’s coming true. “I love that I can take you to the DMLE do, and no one will dare say a single fucking thing.” He should have realised this after coming out to his children.

“I’ll ask,” agrees Draco, rather than telling him yes.

He doesn’t let go of his hand, their fingers twined, and Harry realises that his higher-ups must know. Harry’s (Alleridge and the Minister) will know after this. They’re not wearing gloves, but the wind is chilly, replacing most of the sensory thrill with hard bone. Flowers are popping up in the grass where they’re walking; there’s quite a lot of wind.

“What are you doing for Lord Mountbatten’s birthday?” Draco changes the subject. He means Teddy. Harry loves that he knows that both dates are close in April, though it’s a slip for him to admit it.

“He’ll plan his own party; I’ll be making a cake.”

And Harry’s comfortable with this. But he also loves Teddy very much, and he snapped at him the other month in the pub.

Draco’s giving him a look, his widow’s peak softened by the cap. His expression seems certain that there’s a bad smell.

“I might buy him a motorbike,” Harry confesses in his Barbour, no scarf. It comes out of him in a rush. “Maybe a scooter, so that I can threaten him with destitution and needing to join Deliveroo.” He’s not sure how to explain; he wouldn’t have explained, if Draco hadn’t asked. He tries to keep it in. He didn’t see Teddy for his birthday last year and it nags at him, what Teddy must think. “He’s been such a good housepet and badgerly Potterpin; I couldn’t have done it without him…”

“What about those scooters children have,” Draco suggests, indulging him, his hand bones as they squeeze between Harry’s knuckles. “He dresses like he’s six.”

“I could get him one of those e-scooters,” Harry suggests, watching the twinkle in Draco’s expression, wondering if it will go away before the next time he leaves. “He can go out and terrorise pedestrians.” Harry shouldn’t use _terrorise_ as a casual verb.

“That sounds like something he would do.” Draco’s smirking under the daydream-blue sky, Harry’s hat on his head. “Though I’m not sure that they’re legal,” he lets reality intervene. “At least not yet.”

Harry’s never been in charge of his other kids’ birthday presents, though he’s always bought them spontaneous gifts. With a touch of panic, his mind goes blank as he tries to imagine what he should get them this year, their birthdays all in May. They do small gifts at Christmas. He and Ron have had an arrangement for years where Harry buys him a pint as a symbol. And – “It’s your birthday in June,” he remembers, squeezing Draco’s hand tight, looking down between them. “D’you have anything in mind, or would you like a surprise?”

He forgets that he’s just bought him boots.

“I want what we all want, HP,” Draco says as though he’s confused, frowning, eyes sharp, stepping in close and taking Harry’s jaw and kissing him, even as breath rushes quickly up Harry’s nose. “Targets rather than conditions and for my investments to net a return.”

“You’re such a nob,” Harry tells him, breathing harshly as he’s kissed in the daylight.

Draco holds him closer. “I’m not talking about when I’m at work.”

* * *

Something happens, that night.

Back at Harry’s, they drink beer in the upstairs living room, and Harry resents the feeling of each minute drifting by, even when they’re distracted by kissing and distracted from kissing by chitchat, laughter, drinking beer, slouching back to relax. Teddy will be home eventually – it’s past midnight and he’s currently out. If Draco’s here when he gets in that will earn them remarks, no matter how perfect a badgerly godson Teddy obviously is, and Harry doesn’t want to be judged for staying up with Draco. He wants to keep watching Draco laugh.

“What?” Draco asks him, them both tucked up on the comfy playroom sofa, the walls their paint-box lavender hue. Half-finished beers are in their hands, the empties returned to Harry’s kit in the cellar. Harry’s sideways: he’s slouched into one of the arms with his feet off the floor, hooked with their socks into Draco’s lap. The door is ajar to the landing, but Teddy and Kreacher won’t look in. Teddy’ll just comment.

“It was a year ago, you know,” Harry blurts out, swallowing beer.

It makes Harry feel guilty, resenting his godson; he finds himself desperate to fix it.

“I opened a door in my head,” Harry continues, watching Draco frown as he drinks. He’s wearing deep red and Harry’s wearing pale blue, long cleaned of spilt drink. “I should’ve stepped through it by now.” They should be having sex. He’s been thinking nebulous thoughts about sex all day, the way he didn’t when Draco was away, when life was serious and hard. He got himself off when he wanted a moment, always in the dark, and then that feeling went away too. “I tried to tell myself it was different with you, but it’s not. I’m terrible at letting people in.” He still wants to be private together in a corner and to feel something throb.

At the phrase _letting people in_ , a filthy expression gleams in Draco’s eyes, and he takes a firm grip on Harry’s ankle, his right with his own right hand, pushing fingers down Harry’s blue sock; his other hand’s holding his beer. “But imagine the fun I could have,” he complains, stroking tender skin, squeezing a hand around Harry’s reconstructed foot.

This is new.

Harry says nothing, breathing, and Draco meets his eyes, wicked grin glinting before he flicks his wand to make their privacy complete and he pulls off Harry’s sock entirely.

Another swallow of beer, and Harry doesn’t know why he can feel the pressure in his reconstructed foot all the way to his spine, to his head, to his cock. His beer tastes like beer now when he makes it, just fresh; it’s not clear why he shouldn’t buy it from a shop. “I dunno what you’d find if you opened me up.” He means this to sound less filthy than it does. “I don’t want to know.” This might be the crux of it. “I don’t want you to have to deal with it.”

“When did you stop sleeping together?” Draco asks him, interrupting. Harry supposes that he should have seen the question coming.

He isn’t ready to say, drinking beer. “We slept together till the end – till last August.” Him and Ginny, they’re talking about.

Sighing, Draco doesn’t relent, shifting so he’s facing towards him. His eyes are penetrating; he’s feeling up Harry’s reconstructed shin and calf, brushing fingers underneath Harry’s trouser leg, making him shiver. “When did you last take off your clothes and shove –?”

“A year before that,” Harry interrupts, before Draco can be crude. He scowls, looking up, cradled by Draco and by the comfy navy sofa, paint-box lavender purple. His heel is now resting on Draco’s elegant soft ankle, his sock, which is black. “Maybe two years. No more than three.” He’s lost count, in reality.

Draco’s other arm is stretched down the back of the sofa, maroon – it ends with him holding his beer. He turns, shifting into Harry’s feet. “And when you last enjoyed it?” he asks, his thumb pressing hard up into the reconstructed arch of Harry’s foot.

Harry swallows, feeling small, feeling turned on. He doesn’t answer.

“The millennium started from zero,” Draco points out, not letting him go. “It’s easy to count.”

“I enjoyed it,” Harry insists, always loyal to his family. “I must’ve done.” He frowns, holding his beer, not sure that he remembers. They’re surrounded by books, old toys and games, paint-box lavender purple. “It started feeling like a lie around the time that Lily was born,” he finds himself saying, looking down. “Seven, eight, nine. When you said that Luna got married; I was getting blown up; I don’t know…”

Draco’s huffs, a closed smile on his face. He’s looking down at his hand, now working Harry’s foot, which is cradled in the angles of his legs, grey twill; they’re holding bottles of beer with no rings to clack against the glass. “I’ll pass that on,” Draco suggests about Luna, his throat long as he drinks. “She’ll be glad to know that her heathen marriage destroyed your heterosexual union. It’s a shame that she’s abroad –”

“That’s not what happened,” Harry says before he’s thought it through.

Squeezing Harry’s naked foot, Draco’s shaking his head, grinning because he wasn’t being serious.

“I tried to give her a good life, you know,” Harry says. He sees his and Ginny’s wedding photo in his head all the time. It looks perfect. Ron’s laughing. Luna’s on Ginny’s other side. “That’s all I ever wanted for her. That’s all I want for her now. It would be easier if I was gay or I hated her but I’m not and I never did.”

“So why did it end?” Draco presses gently, looking up.

“I don’t know,” Harry says. He finds himself starting to cry. A year ago, everything was turned upside down, and all he knows is that it made him see it was over. “Lots of reasons. We opened doors in our heads –”

“Yes, but why?” Draco sees the tears come. His expression is too sympathetic; it barely suits his face, though he’s frowning. Harry feels certain that he’ll love him forever, whoever they were in school.

“I stopped coming home,” is all that Harry can say. “I couldn’t come home anymore, and the pain of that… She asked if I would give it up, and after that I don’t know –”

Shifting on the sofa, Draco’s holding his eyes and then for some reason he’s setting Harry’s foot higher between his legs, shifting closer down the cushions towards him. Harry doesn’t know what’s happening or why this is happening now. There’s more of Draco than there looks behind his trousers, when Harry agrees, swallows and pushes in his foot. Draco’s breath hitches; he shuffles to hike his trousers higher over his knees.

Harry feels warm wool twill against his reconstructed skin, mostly in the arch rather than his heel and toes. He feels more. Draco keeps cradling him close as he shifts closer, pressing his thumb under the joint of Harry’s big toe, rubbing in again. His hand is hard bones and warm.

If Harry kicked him, it would hurt until morning, maybe longer. Maybe there’d be permanent damage; he can only imagine. Harry doesn’t want to kick him; he likes the heat in his eyes too much. He loves him so much, for fuck’s sake.

“I know that she stopped loving me,” he finds himself saying nonetheless, something acid inside him; he feels tension in his leg as Draco encourages it back. He swallows and he feels it like anger, still holding his beer with his other hand in a fist. “She promised that she would love me forever, but she didn’t. I know that she stopped. She resented it –”

“Do you really know that?” Draco asks, pushing closer to him, making Harry bend his knee fully, stretch his other leg to the floor, unquestionably aroused against his foot. “Come on –”

“She stopped loving me because I wouldn’t give it up.” It takes all of his effort, Harry finds, not to kick him hard. Once, twice, again. He breathes hard instead. “I know she did,” he says, breathing, his cursed muscles shaking, and he has to turn over himself to put his beer on the floor because he’s crying and it’s breaking up his face. “ _Please,_ ” he begs, covering it, desperately trying not to kick his leg, because he doesn’t actually know this at all.

Setting down Harry’s foot, his own beer, Draco stretches down his front and stops making him face it, for a while.

* * *

The Easter holidays go by in a blitz of noise and cooking and teenagers shouting up and down stairwells, and Harry’s not sure who to thank that the case didn’t prevent him from having this – that he was allowed to enjoy this, this year. Teddy regresses with the other three in number 12, so Harry has four children to cook and clean for, but he enjoys it – he’s always enjoyed it – keeping up with what he can and not bothering with the rest; rowing with Kreacher when Kreacher takes on more than his share.

He sees how the next few years will go, at Easter, and he thinks that he’s seeing it right. The kids will come down to number 12 between terms and see Ginny in Hogsmeade whenever they like, both her and Harry at quidditch. It’s easy with magic; there’s the floo. Ginny’s cleaned out the very last of her things, clearly happy in her house or at least the location. She’ll buy somewhere soon, Harry expects. She has wealth of her own, which makes all of this easy.

Summer is always back and forth to different mates, and now the kids will be going back and forth between number 12 and Ginny’s. Whatever else might be said about Hogwarts, it makes children independent, it brutally cuts that cord, and it’s clear that even Lily will declare by the summer what it is she wants to do. James will decide on collective decisions, and Harry’s been told that these days he’s fair.

Harry and Ginny have made a pact that they won’t let what happened at Christmas happen again.

The house feels empty, when the children go back to school, but Teddy’s there and returned to his adult self; Harry catches him tidying from time to time, and he hears him talking on the phone to his grandmother, who’s always had a landline in her house. They don’t talk about politics, but it sounds like they talk about Teddy’s namesake granddad a bit.

E-scooters are still illegal on public roads, so Harry doesn’t buy one. He buys Teddy a holiday instead, with a spare ticket he can use for Petra the girlfriend or not, because she’s still around and Harry’s trying to understand how people satisfy their higher-level needs. The hotel room’s a double and it’s only Ryanair; the extra ticket costs less than taking Draco out.

Really, everything’s great. Draco’s given permission to attend the DMLE do, and while they’re not spending as much time attached to each other’s front as Harry would like, there are odd moments when Harry finds not his foot between Draco’s legs but his own head and face, eyes shut as he nuzzles and mouths up twill trousers, Draco breathing and cradling the back of his head – the smell of him literally sex and so strong, his cock clearly so hard – until Draco’s breath hitches or part of the house creaks and Harry realises that it’s weird not to be doing this properly, bottles it and climbs up Draco’s body for a kiss.

Once, deep in the dark morning, because Draco hasn’t gone home but the lights have faded because Kreacher’s asleep and Harry’s fatigued, something deeper happens which involves Draco saying, “I’m not taking them off,” and undoing Harry’s zip. Harry holds onto the nape of Draco’s hair and gulps through it, eyes shut, seeing him home after with a round of jam and toast to take with him through the floo.

“Thanks,” Draco says, before he bites and tears the slice of toast, munching, dark jam glistening in the light. He hasn’t dropped Harry’s eyes, it feels like, since Harry opened them when it was done. “You realise that I didn’t do it because I was hungry?”

“But you are,” Harry says feebly, pointing.

Draco cleans his bottom lip with his teeth, holding Harry’s toast. “But I am,” he agrees, before he takes another bite, frowning as though Harry’s a puzzle.

At the party, at least, no one dares say a single fucking thing.

“It’s not because they’ve unlearned homophobia,” Draco murmurs in a moment when they’re caught in a corner, alone, sipping drinks, the speeches all finished. He’s smirking as though this is a joke, their conversation existing in the shadows of chatter and clinking glasses around them. “It’s because those who aren’t in awe of you find you utterly terrifying.”

“I’m a pikachu,” Harry protests, both of them dressed in dark robes.

“I have no idea what that means,” Draco dismisses, frowning as he complains.

As ever, the party’s taking place in the Ministry atrium, the ceiling above them peacock blue with gold twinkling lights, gilded fireplaces around them and everyone in dress robes. Instead of the Fountain of Magical Brethren, there’s its replacement, blocky and not gold – a cataloguey beige-grey stone.

“Oh, it’s a _punishment_ for not being racist,” Draco suddenly observes, changing the subject because this thing is his bête noire and it must have been bothering him all night. He does a voice and this one sounds a lot like Kreacher, “ _Minister, Minister, yes, I think that this would be the least offensive…_ ”

He makes Harry laugh all the time. Harry’s not sure how much of it isn’t just him thinking out loud. This time he finds himself snorting and he actually agrees; he can imagine why Draco might be triggered by this, too. “There could have been a few swans and dolphins. Waterlilies. Zigzags.” The Ministry is full of passive aggressive fucks.

Draco’s glancing over Harry’s shoulder now, too aware of his surroundings, Harry’s coming to believe. “You’re on,” he mutters under his breath, offering two more seconds’ warning.

“Harry!” someone accosts, making Harry turn around. Emerging from the crowd is a wizard in his fifties whose name Harry will remember in a minute; he only remembers that he’s a twat who’s somehow ended up at Harry’s rank in Improper Use. White. “Mr Malfoy,” he adds genially to Harry’s date, with not nearly the respect he deserves. “We were just talking about the inquiry,” into race and the Ministry, is what he means; Harry’s not sure who’s _we_. “You’re in charge of that, aren’t you?”

“I represent us on the action group,” Harry tells the wizard, waiting for the catch, holding his wine. He was put up for it instead of volunteering, but he’s been trying to make the best of it he can. It’s embarrassing – most departments have sent their head and/or a senior member of staff with stake. Harry can never remember who the Mysteries representative is. He talks to Kingsley and Percy about the drafts they’ve been given and pretends that they’re not confidential.

Hermione’s said that the same arrangement’s not worth her job. She’s a legal clerk, supposedly, so it’s true that her job would be at risk – and Harry’s the senior auror, he reminds himself.

“It seems to have been going on forever,” comes the idle reflection, laconic against laughter and high spirits around them. “Surely the point of an action group is to take action, no? It’s always the same with these things…”

“Well, we’ve had the inquiry now,” Harry says, because that was a separate thing. It’s more out-of-date every second they talk, that’s true. “We’re currently working on the response.” He’s had this argument at least ten times; it’s easy to slot himself into the groove. “The final stages are coming together, and after that we’ll need to implement. It might take a few years –” It might take a decade, another one. “– but frankly I think that we should be ashamed to walk this building as long as there’s anyone in the country who expects unjust treatment from the Ministry. I don’t care if they’re witch, wizard, muggle, being or creature,” he continues self-righteously. “Draco and I were just saying what a difference the new fountain –”

“I don’t know whether the Ministry hasn’t bitten off more than it can chew. If the DMLE could be pragmatic –”

“I’ve always been pragmatic. I’m also highly motivated by shame.”

Draco drifts away as they get into the back and forth. It goes on for a while, and in the corner of his eye Harry watches his unspeakable slink among groups of people he cannot possibly know. He likes to piss off the old-guard Slytherin dads, but he’s wearing robes, here at this party, and he fits in. Posh white wits are welcome anywhere, really, and Draco’s very funny. Everyone knows that he’s come here with Harry, but this only makes him an entertaining pet.

He’s doing an impression right now, flaring his hand and his eyes while the people near him laugh. It collapses into poise, into teeth, and Harry can just see the thin patch of hair on the crown of his head. He can get away with more, maybe, really, in some ways, than his father will have done before.

“If you weren’t you,” Draco murmurs to Harry later, when they’re hiding in shadows again, “you would have been sidelined out of this place by the age of thirty-five.”

“Well, that only makes it more important,” Harry tells him shortly, het up, suddenly feeling like he could take some very fucking radical action before the night is through. He scratches up the back of his short hair.

He has a feeling that Draco’s conclusion has been deduced from no more than half an hour’s surface research and he’s not surprised by the findings; he’s surprised that they’re so very clear. Maybe Draco’s just good at his job, but the people in this atrium have always told him that they pride themselves on their tact. 

“Hm,” Draco hums, plucking at the front of Harry’s robes, out of sight. “Time for home, I think,” he sensibly suggests, looking up.

“They’re all fuckers,” Harry finds himself snapping as they stride towards the floos, shoes on marble, lights above them, much of the echoing crowd drifting in a similar direction now it’s late. “You wait till I’m Head Auror.”

This career path was inevitable, really.

“I’m quaking,” says Draco sarcastically, his nose sharp and angular, his eyes telling him to have some actual tact.

 _Sorry,_ Harry doesn’t tell him, looking around them, refusing eye contact and locating a fireplace not in use. Cadging Draco’s glass to dump it with his own on the mantelpiece, thrashing powder at the floo, sending Draco first so that no one can touch him, he floos through to the burnt orange living room, downstairs. The sound of Harry’s voice changes, with the atrium’s echo far away. “Every year I forget how much I hate that fucking thing.”

Ginny used to enjoy it, Harry remembers. He’s so sure. They used to have sex when they came home. They used to have sex all the time when they were twenty-five. Maybe they thought that the DMLE do was a good joke. They used to have a lot of friends in the department, Harry remembers.

“I had a good time,” says Draco in his robes, and Harry doesn’t think that he’s lying. He’s smiling at Harry, a little wrinkle to his nose, always playfulness to his eyes.

They drift into the Valentine pink hallway, to the bottom of the stairs. The purple living room’s become their canoodling place, door shut so that Teddy’s not embarrassed. It’s Tuesday night so he should be asleep, floors away.

“You really are different at work,” Draco’s continuing – this is an amused observation.

“It’s a stressful environment,” Harry supposes. Reality is a stressful place. He looks up the stairs and breathes. “Was I awful?” he asks, turning around, aware of the lightning bolt slashing open his face, aware that he believes that this made his wife stop loving him.

“You were you.” Draco steps in close, and he looks so different to Harry now from when they were teenagers, worn in like a pair of favourite shoes. He traces Harry’s hairline with his fingers, drifting over scar and then eyebrow; Harry shivers. He pushes his glasses a touch up his face. “You were working. You shouldn’t have brought me, really,” Draco chides, meeting Harry’s eyes. “A little woman would have been better.”

“The Office doesn’t get a say in that,” Harry finds himself swearing, glaring deeply into grey eyes. It’s nothing different from what he ever promised Ginny, who’s always been loud and loopy on elf wine. “If they want a party, they get who I’m with.”

Breathing into teeth, Draco rolls his eyes. “HP, this isn’t a game,” he reminds him, which is odd, because usually he says that it is.

“There are limits and that’s mine,” is all Harry can say to him, shrugging.

Draco’s looking at him.

“What?” demands Harry shortly, conscious of his short greying hair and his robes.

“One day you must fuck me when you’re like this,” Draco says bluntly, the walls around them warm pink.

With a rush of blood to his face, Harry steps away from him and looks down, silenced by the thought of it.

“It’s all right; it’s only a kink,” Draco immediately comforts him, stepping closer into his space, crowding him up against the pink wall. “I’m more myself with the wide-eyed ingenu,” he insists. “Waffling on about jam.” Harry looks up. “That’s who you are underneath, when you’re exhausted, did you know that? I like it.”

“Oh,” Harry says. He forgets about climbing the stairs.

“Yes,” Draco approves of his expression, coming in closer, scratching fingers into Harry’s hair and looking at him. “I’ll show you the world, Harry Potter,” he promises, breathing so close to Harry’s face and smelling like he gets so much sex. He hasn’t had much from Harry. The dissonance would be easy to resolve. “All I ask is for you to fix me,” Draco’s going on intensely, grey eyes wide. “I so desperately want to be good,” his voice lilts.

Harry’s not sure what the fuck joke Draco’s making, but the overdone woe in his expression is making him laugh.

“I love you,” Harry blurts out, entirely by accident, the only way he’s ever blurted these words. “Merlin,” he finds himself apologising. Also for not getting the joke.

Draco sighs, clonking their faces together like a rejoinder. “ _Harry,_ ” he accuses, eyes shut and pressing into Harry’s nose. He inhales and breathes out cool breath all over Harry’s cheek, making him shiver. He’s complaining, mostly.

“Valentine,” Harry tries to play with him, wrapping arms around his back.

“We haven’t even fucked,” Draco complains, pressing hips against him, a quick soft kiss, and it’s not that he isn’t saying it back… “You still love your wife,” he grumps, woebegone.

“I’ll always love my wife,” Harry accepts, his arms very low on Draco’s back. “But I convinced myself –”

“I love you too,” allows Draco, interrupting.

“ – and now I’m in love with you.”

Draco’s grin pulls around his teeth. “But must you say it when I’m tired and full of cheap wine?” he demands, absolutely impossible to please. “My ears are ringing with arguments from fuckers,” he uses Harry’s word. His eyes are soft.

There’s familiarity in them and Harry’s so certain that Draco was there, for the case this year and others before.

“D’you believe in any of this?” Harry asks him, with no belief in the power of his love anymore. His ability to let people in. He thinks about building his greenhouse with Kreacher, and how he’s not sure that the orange trees will bear fruit. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“I should say that I believe in something,” says Draco, affronted. “The amount of effort that I’ve been putting in.”

“What effort’s that?” Harry demands, back against the wall, looking down between them. “I’m the one who’s been wooing you.”

Draco tips his head to the side, bemused humour in his expression. “You cannot believe that this is true.”

“I take you out all the time –” Harry complains, eyes on his.

“You barely listen to a word I say –”

“Most of what you say is nonsense!”

Laughing, Draco’s looking at Harry as though to point out that this is the least seductive thing he could have said. He bites in his lower lip. “I made a decision, you know,” he reveals, standing close in Harry’s arms, touching their noses together as though they might belong to the pink of the walls. “I made a conscious decision to capitalise on your estrangement from your wife. A chance to become your intimate, I thought,” he says intimately, so close to Harry’s mouth, grinning again with his teeth. “You’ve only become more powerful since school.”

“You’re such a fucking snake,” Harry accuses, arms wrapped around him, watching his mouth and thinking about sex.

“I thought that you were straight,” Draco murmurs, very close. “Then you started eyeing me up!” he complains, entirely amused. Harry meets his eyes, innocent. “Well, that clinched it,” Draco narrates. “I only had a small window before you signed up on Grindr, found some buff twenty-year-old with a fetish for magical scars and being accosted with incidental snacks – married the bastard and adopted a pair of Potterpwink non-binary children.”

Harry blinks, because he didn’t realise that this set of interests could be searched for on an app. Nor that Draco had realised the extent to which he might be a serial monogamist.

“There was no time,” Draco flares up, looking off into the living room before he possessively lands his elbows either side of Harry’s head. “One of the fanatics would have nabbed you.” He’s looking at Harry down his nose, intense, his mouth set in a frown. “You would have found the shrine eventually, but by then you’d only be getting out after fifteen years of stalking or a suicide –”

“Draco,” Harry cuts him off, frowning, because they’re home and that’s too dark; the walls are pink around them. He deals with stalkings and suicides at work.

“I’m a better catch than one of the fanatics,” insists Draco with his own aimless indignation, mouth turned down, as though he might in fact need Harry to reassure him of this. _I’ve only ever played away for the job,_ he seems to be promising, bizarrely.

“That’s why I was wooing you,” Harry insists, irrevocably compromised, tightening his arms around his back, too warm and breathing him in. “You fancied me when you were twenty-five.”

Draco rolls his eyes, his tone arch. “I wanted to fuck you to corruption when I was twenty-five,” he says bluntly, and there are a lot of blunt edges to him. “I was angry.” He glares. “Don’t let’s go too far.”

“You should stay,” suggests Harry, his mind blank and his instincts prim with exhaustion, looking at the angles of his face. “I’ll put you up in the spare room; we’ll do something in the morning.” By this, Harry realises, he can only mean have some breakfast.

Draco snorts, kissing him to distraction, and Harry’s crunching robes across Draco’s back. Smelling like sweet booze and heady cologne, always too aware of what he’s doing, Draco reaches between them and makes Harry jump – claws the thigh which has feeling and finds ways with his fingers, here in the light. “I can sleep in your bed,” he says, low, his other arm crowding Harry’s head on the wall.

Harry’s jumping and his mouth’s gone dry and really, there are a lot of robes in the way –

“Your fucking shit wooing is going to take us ten years,” Draco murmurs, kissing Harry softly on the lips.

“OK,” Harry tells him in a panic.

And then, as though he’s been assessing him, Draco’s laughing, prodding him in his bits so he jumps yet again. “You fucking liar,” he says, easy, with a short kiss to Harry’s cheek, another longer to his mouth as he takes his jaw again.

“I want to,” Harry promises, the words choked and low in his throat, full of breath; he imagines it. “I don’t know why –”

“You don’t need to make excuses.” For a little while, Draco just kisses him where they’re standing up downstairs. Harry holds him close, and all he wants is for him to love him forever, the way that he’ll love him.

 _And it’s so nice in this house,_ Harry thinks.

* * *

They make it to Harry’s bed eventually and collapse, Draco in his underwear and Harry in his nightclothes, shuffled on quick. Hours later, Harry wakes in the dark from a dream of Draco fucking him, which feels a lot like doing the fucking himself, likely because his unconscious mind only has limited reference points.

Accurate or not, he’s hard from the remembered, imagined sensation of Draco lying on top of him and something nebulous happening with anatomy – and Draco’s clambering over him, swearing, “Fuck,” in the pitch dark night.

“Mm,” complains Harry, feeling half-drunk. He thinks he’s heard a ping, some sort of sting in his ear.

“Yes, I know,” agrees Draco, sounding strung out, now resting on top of him – pressing his face into Harry’s on the pillow and kissing him not far from his mouth. “Why do you have your party in the middle of the week?” he complains as though Harry is his department.

“It’s a hazing thing,” Harry says, eyes shut, wrapping arms around him. He’s willing his cock to settle under the weight of Draco’s hips, which bring their own jutting pressure. “We go in and make fun of anyone who shows weakness.”

Draco pauses on this. “You’re not even joking,” he reflects, sounding tired as though asking, _Why am I surprised?_

“I never joke about the DMLE,” Harry says, before groaning, because Draco’s moving, leaving him cold.

“It’s four o’clock in the morning,” says Draco, and it’s certainly very dark. Harry chooses to believe him, rolling over, finding a leg, some shorts, nebulous not-so-squashy bits in which to rummage his hand. “You can sleep for another few hours.”

“You can sleep with me,” Harry mumbles, eyelids too heavy to open – even as he finds his way into where Draco’s shorts breach, grazing skin with fingers. He finds himself smiling, because he enjoys making new discoveries.

“Alas, I cannot,” Draco says, slotting into a grope just briefly so that he can kiss Harry more fully goodbye. “Stop molesting me.”

It feels entirely awful to be left, Harry acknowledges, his hand left tingling and cold. It feels fair, nonetheless, at this stage of his life. It feels familiar and he knows what he’s getting into, he promises himself as he drifts back to sleep.


	9. April, May

One evening at the end of April, Harry’s talking to Lily about training for the Gryffindor-Slytherin quidditch match. She’s a full member of the team for the summer term, and he wants her to feel proud whatever happens. He’s sitting in the purple living room; Draco’s downstairs and undoubtedly embarrassing Teddy in a double act with Kreacher.

Draco and Kreacher seem to find each other difficult, which Harry was surprised by, though they’re fine when performing for others. Kreacher takes Draco very seriously indeed, while Draco, Harry’s learning, doesn’t take himself seriously at all.

He lives in a very masculine house, Harry thinks, missing the two years, for a moment, when it was Kreacher and Ginny and Lily and him. He missed a lot of time with Lily in those years.

“The thing is, Dad,” Lily’s telling him, chatty and observant and nearly thirteen, her pikachu up to her shoulder where she’s sitting inside red curtains. For now, the pikachu is less a comfort blanket than a cushion to keep her arm hooked on; she’s playing with its ear. She has never sounded more like a Gryffindor. “I don’t want to win because Albus lets me.”

Harry scoffs. “Why would Albus to let you?” Albus has never let anyone win anything; he has far too much pride. “Has he said that he’s going to let you?” This is more like something Albus would do.

“No – duh,” Lily scoffs, rolling her eyes and tossing her hair like Ginny always would. “I mean that Albus is off his game. He’s fighting with Scorpius,” she confides, and this is something that Harry did not know. It takes him by surprise. “He’s in a big grey mood, all grumpy. If he wants to win, he needs to shape up and focus, like Cassie says. Cassie’s amazing,” Lily reminds Harry unnecessarily.

Cassie is Oliver Wood’s daughter Cassandra: sixth-year captain of the Gryffindor quidditch team. She’s one of James’s mates, and Ginny’s long been sure that James fancies her. Lily is in awe of her, Harry’s learning from this conversation.

If Lily’s like her mother, Harry thinks now, in three years’ time she’ll be in love, and the only thing they can hope for is that her brother and Cassie aren’t married by that point.

“Why is Albus fighting with Scorpius?” is all Harry asks, because he likes to think that his daughter, at least, will have life sussed out.

“Maybe you should ask him,” his daughter suggests, sounding like a teenage girl, playing with the ear of her pikachu. “Or Mr Malfoy.” She widens her eyes and opens her mouth, mockingly, as though shocked by her own burn. It’s been a few weeks and she’s young, or else someone in the castle has helped her make peace with the future to come.

“I can certainly talk to Mr Malfoy,” Harry agrees, aiming for positive reinforcement. “Mr Malfoy’s a very good friend of mine…” He glances up unconsciously towards the door, all the books tidy in their shelves on the wall.

“Mr Malfoy’s moved into our house.” This will be Teddy’s intelligence.

“He’s not moved in,” Harry says, meeting his daughter’s mocking eyes in the mirror. There’s nothing else he can say that’s not damning.

Really, it’s more that he’s not left, since waking up in Harry’s bed. Harry enjoys finding him there. Mopsy’s been bringing round fresh clothes, Harry’s certain – not that he’s caught sight of her, but tasteful vases of flowers have been appearing in aesthetically pleasing places. They bring a touch of feminine energy, at least, for the odd hours Harry’s at home. Kreacher calls the arrangements presumptuous and unnecessary, which never fails to crack Harry up.

His tiny Lily seems impossibly mature in the mirror, her ponytail high and her robes hard black – and Harry remembers Ginny and Hermione (always) telling him that girls mature quicker than boys, somehow. “You’re allowed to move him in,” Lily tells Harry regally, now, forcing him to suppress a smile, “but I’m not calling him Dad or Pops or any other nonsense.” She sounds like Harry when she says _nonsense_ , and much less American.

Six months is a long time, Harry supposes, in his tiny children’s heads. “I’d never ask you to do that,” Harry promises. “Though it would be a good joke. Can you imagine Mr Malfoy’s face?”

And his daughter likely can’t, Harry realises – but he can.

Lily’s wrinkling her nose. “You should call him by his first name if he’s your boyfriend,” she suggests, because Harry won’t ever win. “What even is that?”

This makes Harry laugh out loud. “His name’s Draco,” he says, unable to believe that Lily doesn’t know this.

“Like a dragon?” Lily says brightly, too bright. “That’s cool.”

He tries to get Albus on the mirror after Lily – surprised, almost certainly unfairly, when he picks up.

And he tries to go the indirect route, like a Slytherin would.

“Dad, why have you called me?” asks Albus after not very much of this, sitting in his common room, surrounded by the lake and by green, modern furniture in leather and chrome, quiet chatter far away. He sounds impatient, and the thing is that even in Slytherin, he’s always been Harry and Ginny’s son.

“Lily told me that you were fighting with Scorpius,” Harry tells him, deciding to be direct after all. “What’s that about?”

Harry expects for him to deflect or refuse to give an answer, but Albus seems intent to act contrarily Gryffindor, for now. He just swears. “That fucking dickhead thinks that you’re not good enough for his dad.”

Snug in a comfy blue sofa, Harry’s surprised by this. “What’s wrong with me?” he asks immediately, though really he’s surprised that Albus doesn’t agree. “And don’t swear –”

“Don’t make me make a list,” snorts Albus, sounding like himself. He looks to the side, scoffing, his hair deep red-brown in the underground light. “It’s more like, what makes Scorpius’s dad so special? Like, what, the Malfoys are too good for the Potters?” He’s glaring into nowhere. His voice is deeper than at the start of the year. Harry thought that it had dropped and that was that. “Pull the other one, yeah? We fucking run this place. They made Teddy Head Boy; they’re gonna make James Head Boy.”

It’s true that James is a prefect, but James has never acted fussed… “How can you be sure –”

“They’re gonna make James Head Boy; I’ll be seeker and Lily’ll see Partridge off the team.” _Oh I see,_ Harry thinks. This is Albus’s grand vision for next year. “Who’s Scorpius Malfoy?” he sneers, his eyes green. “Slytherin chaser number three? Who cares?”

“Albus, you’re in Hogwarts, not… Westeros,” a word comes to him, and he thinks he’s got it right.

“Dad, don’t embarrass yourself,” says Albus cuttingly, admitting no familiarity with this word. “And you should think about your association, if Mr Malfoy thinks that he’s better than you.” His eyes glint, to meet Harry’s.

“He doesn’t think that,” Harry assures his son. “He thinks I’m aces.” He thinks better of Harry than Harry thinks of himself, he gets the impression, or maybe just that he’s better than him. Harry doesn’t think that this is how it works.

“Well, he should tell his son that,” Albus snaps, and Harry remembers his feud with the other boys in his dormitory. It must feel like catastrophe, to be feuding with Scorpius too. “He should tell him to shut his face.”

There are many contradictory remarks, Harry thinks, in Albus Severus’s statement. “Albus,” he says, taking a gamble. He sits himself seriously into the sofa, meeting green eyes with his own. “You don’t think that I’m too good for Mr Malfoy, do you?”

“Call him Draco, Dad, for fuck’s sake,” Albus deflects, looking away into the Slytherin common room. “You sound like Kreacher on one of his Black family nostalgia trips.”

Harry keeps looking at him, green eyes on green.

“You made your choice!” Albus explodes and it’s surprising, Harry’s son hissing in the corner of his common room. They call it the snake pit, even among themselves; they’ll be looking and this will be why Albus is now trying to contain himself. “The hat gave you a choice, and you chose the goodies. I don’t know why…”

“The world is not split into goodies and baddies down the line of Gryffindor and Slytherin –” Harry’s been trying to get this message over for years, but against the rest of wizarding society the struggle’s long felt real. Also against Ron’s sense of humour, as much as Harry loves him. 

“The hat gave me a choice too, you know,” Albus is interrupting him, turning red around his freckles. “I chose the baddies.” He’s never told Harry this. As far as Harry knows, he’s never told his mum. “You weren’t supposed to follow me. I was trying to leave home.”

Harry tries not to react, sitting in the upstairs, purple living room. “What d’you mean, you were trying to leave home?”

Still red under dark red hair, Albus grits his teeth. “D’you not remember how you used to talk about Hogwarts?” he asks accusingly, his face small in the mirror. “Like it was a big, grand adventure?”

Harry doesn’t remember describing Hogwarts like this, though he supposes that it did once feel that way, everything bright-coloured and new.

“How was I supposed to have that in Gryffindor, when it’s nothing but Grandma’s front room?”

There are many Weasley cousins in Gryffindor. “You would have been learning new things,” Harry tries – but he does find it difficult, trying to imagine what the common room is like for his children, with Bill and Fleur’s kids and then Percy and Audrey’s, his own and Ron and Hermione’s. All of their extended circle.

“James and that lot are so cosy in their tower,” is Albus’s conclusion. He tuts, dismissive of this, looking off into the snake pit on his side of the mirror, which must be full of snakes. “It’s different here,” he says quietly, his tone muted, and he never talks about what it’s like in his house. He buries the confession in noise and quick words. “It’s harder,” he says. “I didn’t realise that people here are just James, kicking back after Sunday lunch. But they’re different people, Dad; they eat different lunches; I’ve never really fit in. But it’s an adventure, you know?”

Harry finds his heart breaking, because he knows how it feels to live in reality. To go to work. Whatever it is that his son has done. Gone adventuring. “Albus – whatever made you feel like you had to leave home?”

“But that’s just it,” Albus says, his expression hardening at the sight of Harry’s expression, and Harry wonders if this is how he deals with empathy. “You and mum always act like leaving home’s what you do when you don’t like it. I thought you’d figured it out, with all this.”

He means the divorce, Harry assumes, but in any case – and not for the first time – Harry wonders whether Hogwarts employs a counsellor these day or if he hasn’t vastly underestimated James.

“Leaving home’s something you do when you want to see what else there is,” Albus says, as though he never could have chosen red and gold. “And you know you love adventures,” Albus says, because he’s Harry’s son, shaking his head so that Harry can’t meet his eyes. “But, Dad, I don’t want you here,” he says quickly, sounding almost protective. “They’d eat you alive. Mum would be fine.”

Never for the first time, Harry struggles to imagine what his children see, when they look at him. It’s not a missive that ends with _HP_. And when they look at Ginny – when they look at the world. Because Harry’s not sure that Ginny was ever fine. It was brutal, what the industry and media did to her, for daring to have a baby at the age of not-quite twenty-three. At Teddy’s age now. For doing it again at twenty-five; she never played again. She earns good money from coaching, but never what she should.

They spoke about whether to keep James, at the time. Ginny said that she didn’t give a fuck. Her mother had had Bill at twenty-three and she wasn’t going to put off starting a family so that she could throw a fucking ball.

Harry thinks that she surprised herself, when she said this. She surprised him.

Talking to Albus, Harry wonders if he should imagine their family as Ginny’s adventure – a chance to express her own views, which trumped her need for recognition after all, in the end. She and Neville used to spend hours, she said, just chatting over chips about the kids.

“I’m not re-sorting myself into Slytherin,” Harry tries to explain, suppressing the urge to suggest that if any of the pampered, post-millennial snakes in that house are upsetting his son, they should try it with him. Try it once. “I’m just… Taking Mr Malfoy out from time to time,” he says euphemistically, because most of the time he’s keeping him in.

Once upon a time, Harry brewed the Polyjuice Potion and broke into the Slytherin common room. He’s been doing the same for the past twenty years, he supposes, and he can only hope that he’s still himself. He may have become Millicent Bulstrode’s cat.

“That’s not how everyone here sees it,” Albus says, sitting in the pit, not retreating to his room. Harry’s proud to see him sitting there, maybe for the first time.

“You said it yourself,” Harry throws back at him from the lavender-purple old playroom, wanting him to see what he’s done to go to where he is from where Harry’s sitting. “You’re surrounded by dickheads who’ve never left home. What do they know? Don’t confuse being right with having people agree with you, Albus.”

Albus scoffs, though he seems slightly buoyed up, looking back at him. His green eyes are glinting, and Harry wonders if this is what his own look like. He wonders if anyone’s ever told his son that he looks like his father, much more than James does, in some lights. “You can’t get anything done if no one agrees with you,” he argues, like a snake.

Harry tuts. “Is that the lake I see behind you, or the clouds?” He points, and he makes Albus look. _I thought that you were in Slytherin._ “Where’s your ambition?”

His son looks at him, flat. “You’re such a Gryffindor, Dad.”

* * *

When Harry and Draco fuck, it happens unexpectedly, but, really, there have been a few signs that it was coming.

“Stay for the weekend,” Harry suggests on a Saturday morning at the start of May, waking up with Draco in his bed. It’s what he did last weekend, after the party in the week, but Harry wants him to stay for this weekend too.

“And what shall we do all weekend?” Draco asks him suggestively, languid in his bed. He’s been nattering, propped up on a pillow, and they’ve been talking about birthday presents for the kids. Draco’s radical idea is that Harry sets himself a budget and uses quill and parchment to list their interests, in order to find out how the syllogism concludes. There are still a few days left.

In Harry’s head, when they were doing this, Draco was young and there were sheets. Harry’s not sure why; he knows no one in this country who uses a top sheet instead of a duvet and cover. Draco’s forty years old and his hair is going, his body worn yet controlled like his face. Here in bed, he’s still grinning, and he’s everything that Harry imagined.

Harry rolls onto his back and tries to look thoughtful, wearing pyjama bottoms and a quidditch shirt to cover his chest. “We could go for a walk,” is his suggestion, because he’s actually changing the subject.

Folding over him, wearing nothing but shorts, Draco’s wicked grin is soon kissing him, and both of them forget that they have nowhere to be. At least not until they’re summoned, for today.

It’s been a year, Harry’s not thinking – a full year since he opened the door in his head. A full year since he realised that this one wouldn’t close shut. He doesn’t realise the moment when he’s finally walking through.

There’s light coming in through Harry’s curtains, three sets across grand, tall windows. It’s warm, though Harry doesn’t think that the heat is historically significant. Nonetheless, he finds the bottoms he’s wearing annoying and hot, and with Draco pressed up against him, smiling into kisses, it’s easy to shuffle them off and to take the shirt off too.

He freezes when he’s done it, sitting in bed in the yellow glow of the bedroom; his chest heaves. He remembers that he doesn’t belong. The walls leer around him, sickly sweet while he’s bitter and hard.

The top of Harry’s right leg from his hip to his knee is a mess, without feeling in the hard skin. Draco’s palming it from knee to hip once the bottoms are gone, and Harry feels the pressure in his muscle, which bucks. The lack of feeling is uncanny, otherwise – disturbing, Harry tells himself. Draco pushes harder into the obscene white ridges and marks, spreading his hand down at the knee and keeping Harry pinned, his other hand holding Harry’s softer leg to the mattress. He’s looking at him as tears swell in Harry’s eyes.

Always too aware of what’s going on, Draco’s not missed a beat. “Look at it,” now he suggests, both of them trapped in cream bedclothes.

Harry doesn’t know how Draco worked this out – how it makes him panic to see anything beautiful touch something so ugly, this house and this bed and someone else’s hand. His own hand, for fuck’s sake, the one that doesn’t swear that he mustn’t tell lies. The cognitive dissonance of him and his body in his house, this yellow bedroom, because he doesn’t know how these two things can co-exist.

As he twitches in the light, Harry sees that it’s his right leg that’s scarred, so Draco’s left hand is holding it down – his fingers firm and knuckled, thin muscles taut through his wrist to his elbow to his shoulder. Harry’s leg is strong, and Harry sees a glimpse of an old tattoo on the soft insides of Draco’s arm. He finds his tears coming sharper, to see his beautiful limb ruined too.

“Tell me to let you go,” Draco suggests, his tone low and swallowed as their eyes meet.

They could have made their own beautiful picture, Harry thinks, once upon a time. They were contrasts: black hair and white blond, much more of both; grey eyes and Harry’s startling green; Gryffindor and Slytherin. Draco was an apparatchik, and Harry had a radical cause.

Over the years that contrast has faded, and he doesn’t know if anyone still sees it – if they should. He wants to believe that they’ve ended up in the right place.

“Tell me what’s wrong,” Draco suggests, still holding his leg, his thumb finding the slit of soft skin that remains around the scar, high and hidden near Harry’s groin.

“I want to go home,” Harry finds himself saying, and it comes out of him half-choked.

“Let me take you,” Draco suggests, looking smug as shit for the line.

Harry sniffs fiercely, eyes on his face, so close. “I can’t look at it.”

“Look at it,” he’s immediately told.

Looking down at it, at Draco’s hand, Harry doesn’t know how anyone in St Mungo’s could guess that the mess of his cursed leg follows the topography of the Brecon Beacons, a place that isn’t ugly at all. No one knows why curse scars so often work this way, rewriting the world into flesh, as though in revenge or retaliation for all that magic has written on the world. Harry has the bolt on his forehead and a river on his back, as yet unidentified. It’s farcical, almost, that lines on his chest form the world’s only extant map of Hogsmeade, as far as the healers know.

When Harry stops fighting, his chest heaving with breath, Draco’s other hand starts moving from his soft leg to where Harry’s skin is more tender – up his hip to this scar and the other, a starburst of the Killing Curse in the centre of his sternum. He pushes Harry down, clambers over him, makes sense of how it all interrelates, tracing the route from the Shrieking Shack to the Three Broomsticks to Honeydukes, where Harry’s ticklish, because it’s actually where his nipple should be.

Eyeing down between them, Harry sees the sharp shape of Draco’s dark shorts.

“I didn’t imagine it like this,” Harry tells him, his vision then full of grey eyes and sharp nose.

“Unfortunate,” Draco drawls, plucking off the glasses Harry still wears. “Would you like me to fuck you or not?”

Harry swallows.

Draco sits up now, tossing Harry’s glasses to the nightstand, other hand on his stomach. He’s already shirtless, aglow, and to see him sitting on his thighs Harry finds himself acknowledging that his own cock is right there, jutting between them, hard and heavy and wanting where it nudges Draco’s wrist. More than scars, there’s skin and black hair, and Draco’s fingers are scratching lightly into it. Most of Draco’s scars are just gashes, but there’s a large one over his heart, above _Sectumsempra_ , spiralling up and Harry thinks that the idea is uncanny, but it might be the Orbital, the M25.

“How’d you get that one?” Harry asks, breathing.

“You don’t want to know,” is all Draco tells him, his expression disgust. He glances down between them and it makes Harry jump, he’s so aroused. He feels torn, but his mind keeps reaching for what he wants to go back to, and nothing’s there to reach for. Draco sits forward, the covered weight between his legs hot, nestling up to where Harry’s perpendicular. Harry shivers. “You can fuck me instead, if you like,” he suggests, casually cradling Harry’s cock to his bits with his hand.

At the touch of him, Harry startles harder, gulping, and Draco grins to stretch a thumb and swipe the bead that appears at the end of him.

Harry shakes his head, his thoughts drifting from what they’re talking about. “I want it how you wanted it when you were twenty-five,” he tries to find a reference point.

“No,” says Draco contrarily, still cradling him close, riding himself an inch up and down. His grey eyes are testing and sincere, unashamed. “I was angry when I was twenty-five,” he says simply. “You’re not having that. I’m fat and contented now; look,” he insists, and with his spare hand he rubs and pinches himself where Harry supposes he imagines there’s a gut.

“Yeah, I’m looking,” Harry says, because he is. He forgets what he’s saying for a bit; Draco’s riding against him, bobbing on his thighs; his own muscles and breath are moving with it; his hands are sweating in fists and it feels like raw anticipation. He looks up and he remembers. “I want it how you want it now,” he supposes.

Bobbing, Draco shrugs, contrary. “I could do this for hours.” When his eyes catch on Harry’s his breath hitches and he huffs out a laugh.

He’s driving Harry to distraction. “I don’t know what I want,” is what he says, on his back, flapping his arms, grabbing Draco’s warm legs just above the knees because he suddenly realises that he can _touch him_ – and it makes Draco gasp, his chest hollowing, and if nothing else then he is clearly getting off. “I want it to feel like we’ve been out and we’ve come home and it’s all fine now.”

Holding Harry tighter to him, absolutely rubbing against him, and Harry loves him, he hates him, Draco looks down at Harry’s face, tonguing a tooth and frowning seriously. “I’m not sure that you can have that, if anyone ever could.” He grins to find a line. “HP, you’ll always be on your next adventure.”

“I built a greenhouse,” Harry insists, clawing his perfect muscled legs. His hands are hot; his balls are hotter; he tastes sweat on his lip with his tongue and Draco’s hand is burning hot.

“I thought that you were running a state?”

Harry shakes his head, on an edge. It feels like he’s giving in. “Draco, if you’re not fucking me in the next thirty seconds –”

Breathing raggedly, Draco’s shuffling back, still holding Harry, squeezing him once and wiping him filthy again. Then he’s shuffling out of his shorts, and Harry’s mouth is dry, because he’s watching. He’s not sure, exactly, what’s happening, but Draco’s kneeing out of his shorts and Harry’s forgotten what it’s like, to be presented with the core parts of the person he’s in love with, because there’s only ever one, and it’s incongruous, Draco’s pale limbs and something such a hot shade of red, lurching. The lines of him are completed, ankles to his hips to his shoulders and there’s another line that he’s holding.

“Turn over,” he’s instructing, and Harry’s a mess. He has to wipe his eyes. “I’m going to butter you up like a roast.”

He prattles on about lube and that he’s sorry he can’t give Harry skin, but this is safer – he does not explain why, but there’s time for Harry to accept it. He’s pouring and sliding and groping until Harry reminds him that they sell lube in the supermarket next to the toothpaste, and he’s raised sons, so he knows –

“Did you know that it can do this?” Draco demands, heavy up behind him, and Harry does not understand what happens next.

Really, Harry cannot believe what they’re doing, but they’ve been doing this for months, and this is what it feels like: Draco complaining with the filthiest guttural moan, slippery and hot, both of them sweating and Draco running hands up and down one thigh that feels it and one that never will again, their feet tangled up, something compromised on the way to something Harry has to believe will be good.

Really, Harry thinks, he hasn’t given Draco a single fucking thing that he’s asked for, and now Draco’s giving him this.

He adapts, his gaze full of fuzzy cream and the sun-bright shade of the walls, a new part of him purposed.

The room is glowing, but Harry’s sinking into night behind his eyes, and he’s not sure what noise he’s making, but it’s enough for Draco to tell him, “Shh,” rub his back hollow and push deeper. “Say my name if you’re having fun,” he suggests, sounding breathless, maybe in awe, and he’ll be glad that Harry can’t see his face.

“What?” Harry finds himself laughing, even as Draco does the impossible again, making the bed squeak, and the mattress feels too unstable for this. “Nmph – I’m not doing that. Shut up.”

“Call me Malfoy.” There’s the tone; an arm around Harry’s waist to keep him prone, to yank him in, his other hand squeezing Harry’s feeling thigh. “ _Malfoy!_ ” he does a voice, fucking. “ _Malfoy, oh yes!_ ”

Harry knows he’s being mocked, but his laugh comes out like a screech. “Should I leave you two alone?”

“Will you deny me –”

“I’m not…” Something catches, and it starts to feel like panic, but good, and then it feels like something else entirely.

It seems to take forever, after this, and also nowhere near enough time. Harry’s lost, and when it happens it’s embarrassing, because Harry’s on his knees with his elbows tucked in and he’s sobbing into his fists, submissive he’s not sure to what, burning wet-hot out of his skin.

He’s crying out when Draco makes a deeply satisfied noise, cuddling up inside him, it feels like, as though he loves him, and there’s too much sensation, obscenity thick in the air and everything’s a mess; Harry’s shuddering, coming down, so sad about something, he’s not sure, his love exquisite in his chest as Draco’s sprawling on top of him, up into him, sounding pleased with himself.

Tangling up into Harry’s chest, Draco’s shivering; he feels young and coltish, the way that Harry feels, grappling him close.

Harry’s face is in the soft angles of his cheek, his own eyes shut and weeping as he cools down.

“You were good,” Draco’s breathing incoherently, patting him. “It’s all right. Weren’t you good?”

 _I’m sorry,_ Harry apologises, shaking his head and then pulling in a sob, sweet feelings inside him like sadness as he curls them even closer. “I’ll do better next time,” he promises.

“That was the best fuck of my life,” says Draco bluntly and Harry can’t believe him, even as he turns in for a kiss and Harry kisses him, kisses relaxing them deeper into the bed.

All of Harry’s plans for getting over himself and generally acting like a lothario sink away into this moment of weakness and whatever it is, middle-aged metabolism, because he feels the terror of the moment when Draco stops loving him, the moment when he persuades himself of it, and it might only be ten years away. And then he’s falling asleep.

They wake up for lunch, and Harry gives head to someone packing cock for the very first time, with very little planning, insisting on Draco calling him _Harry_. He does not. Draco’s slipping off the edge of the bed with Harry kneeling on the floor; Harry’s never done this before and keeps pulling him closer, so Draco ends up tumbling to the floorboards and rug.

He shouts and shoots into magical rubber, while Harry finds himself laughing desperately, because cocks are fucking funny and Draco’s telling him, “You bastard; I am a porcelain vase!”

“Mm,” agrees Harry, surprised by how terrified Draco looks, to realise that Harry’s in love with him, that he’s gathering him close to the side of the bed and he wants him. “We’ll have to try that one again.”

* * *

_This is getting ridiculous,_ is Hermione’s line, inevitably, by the end of the week after, in a text on Harry’s phone. _The pair of you are coming round for dinner and you’ll let us judge him properly._

“We’re protective of each other,” Harry tells Draco as he reports this invitation to judgement. He’s been forgetting his filter, when Draco’s in his bed. “They love me unconditionally. I’d say no if they ever asked for a threesome,” is what he says this time, and at some point in his life Harry’s sure that he’s going to get the idea out of his head.

This bright morning, not quite six, Draco’s lounging next to him with the _Daily Prophet_ , long only printed in tabloid – which suits the content anyway, both Hermione and Draco say. The paper’s been delivered by Kreacher with breakfast and some of Mopsy’s flowers, resulting in a tableau which looks like something from the 1950s.

Draco’s holding the paper away from him, above cream. He’s going to need glasses in the next ten years.

The only misfit is Harry, who isn’t a housewife, sitting there naked and scarred with his phone. It feels like a sex act, and Harry’s not sure that he likes the part of himself where this comes from, or if he doesn’t like the part of himself which doesn’t like it.

“Would you, though, Potter?” Draco asks about the threesome, not looking up from the paper, licking a finger before he turns the page. He’s naked too, and the duvet’s barely drawn up to his hips. He’s not quite rolling languidly, but one kick of the bedclothes and Harry would be seeing his cock, which is a sight that he quite likes to see.

“I don’t know why the thought goes through my head,” Harry promises.

All Harry wants is to always be loved by the person he’s fallen in love with.

“I’m fairly sure that it would feel like fucking my parents.” He wrinkles his nose.

Draco acknowledges this. “We don’t want that.” He takes it further, and Harry’s unprepared. “I’ll fuck them for you, if you like,” he suggests, glancing, still holding the paper. “You can watch.”

It makes no sense, how suddenly Harry’s turned on. Really, it’s because Draco’s naked in his bed and said _fuck_.

“You can never tell them,” Harry begs as Draco smirks, folds the _Prophet_ to the breakfast tray, finished, and rounds Harry to the sheets.

“They share a beautiful love.” Draco’s merciless, pushing Harry down by his scarred chest, seizing his arms and then his wrists, talking like a snake and visibly getting hard. Harry’s still holding his hot phone. Hermione’s text is on the screen; his mind is going blank. “Soft and wholesome, I would call it, but that bickering… Don’t you think that they must be electric?”

Draco’s seducing him to vice, Harry thinks – and he’s good. He swallows because it’s working; he’s being sat on and he’s being allowed to pretend he can’t move.

Harry’s seen so much darkness at work over the past twenty years; he doesn’t know what Draco’s doing, bringing it into the house, bringing it here. He's wrapping himself with a charm rushed from his hand, and it’s a reminder of what unspeakables get up to.

“They must be so kind to each other,” Draco tells him unkindly, holding him down, and maybe Harry just wants to know what Ron and Hermione are like; he knows every single other thing else. He doesn’t want to see their bits and he doesn’t imagine them now. “Or maybe they’re not. Maybe there’s a whip.”

Draco plucks the phone from Harry’s hand and it’s not about Ron and Hermione at all, really, though Draco’s texting, holding Harry’s hand hard to his diaphragm, the scarred map of Hogsmeade, holding Harry down hard, and Harry’s hard between their legs, Draco’s arm, Draco’s cock, his old tattoo and Harry’s chest of scars. They’re all tangled up. “Don’t text on my phone!” He’s not even pretending to struggle.

Text sent, the phone’s thrown away. It clatters to the floor, because it’s never clear whether Draco knows the value of material things. “Imagine my corrupting that,” he tells Harry wickedly, his eyes flat like a snake’s, his body so much stronger than it looks.

He comes down close to where Harry’s chest is heaving. And Harry doesn’t want Ron and Hermione corrupted; he doesn’t want himself to be. This is not a healthy way for Draco to talk about himself – yet Harry finds himself undone, if not in the way he expects. He imagines Draco seducing him when he was still married, when he stretches out and kisses him, jumbles them entirely together and pulls Harry’s cursed leg around his hip. He imagines being married now, with this a moment of escape and release, cradling Draco’s head and embracing his shoulders tight.

Draco was an adulterer for years and he seems comfortable with the role, but Harry’s never been unfaithful, so he doesn’t know what it would be like. He would always be unfaithful to have Draco, he imagines, and it always would have been as good as this.

If they weren’t already divorcing, Harry’s certain in this moment that Ginny would be right to leave him. This is fault, absolutely. This is the end of his marriage, absolute. He feels transformed by it, in some way, as the certainty in his chest looks both forward and back.

“I’d rot them to the core,” Draco’s saying, and Harry can’t remember who or what he’s talking about; he’s conjured lube by squeezing his hand to a fist. “All that flesh and these hard bones. And _this_ , Harry,” he says, seizing Harry where he’s hard like a rod, them both together, moving his hand, Draco hot against him, his tone incredulous as Harry sucks air, his arms and scarred shoulders all slim muscle, propped over him. “What would we do with this?”

Not sure what’s happening anymore, Harry takes his jaw and the nape of Draco’s hair, his grip firmer than he’d like as he kisses them both to corruption until the clock on the nightstand is shouting that it’s time to get up, and Draco gets them off before the clock starts sending shocks through the bed.

“I’m very good, aren’t I?” Draco insists when Harry’s broken and breathless, sitting up, lines crinkled at grey eyes, sarcastic grin all in his teeth.

They go to dinner that night at Ron and Hermione’s. Draco is unfailingly polite, only cutting dark, filthy glances Harry’s way every now and again. Harry’s on needles, because he’s never kept such a secret from his friends. Hermione used to tell him that he and Ginny should keep more. Ron keeps pouring more wine, and Harry doesn’t even mind that he’s not in control.

It seems clear, though they try to hide it, that Draco and Hermione already know each other well.

“He’ll do,” Hermione decrees as they’re leaving. She already knew that, Harry guesses. Part of him – a deeply paranoid part – thinks that she planned this whole thing, like Ron with Agatha from Eeylops. She planned him and Ginny, a bit. He likes to imagine her absolutely terrifying at work when she plans things, with no one daring to suggest she have tact.

Half of this might well be how it is.

“Bring him round again,” Ron suggests, and this is easier to take at face value.

“It’s always nice to see you happy, Harry,” Hermione goes further, just being his friend, her eyes a glimpse wet.

It’s never felt like coming home, leaving Ron and Hermione’s for number 12. Even after they stopped apparating between each other’s houses, Ron and Hermione’s home has always been an extension of Harry’s. Tonight the air changes, and if he’s not coming home with Draco to arrive in the burnt orange living room then he is definitely getting into bed. Even as they climb the stairs, the walls pink, Draco’s needling Harry with questions about what would have happened if instead of saying thanks for having them, Harry had kissed his best friends and touched them softly, and Harry doesn’t know where he is. He’s such a perv, he thinks to himself as he kisses Draco hard and they tumble into mattress and pillows and covers.

He feels like a perv in the morning. He just really loves his friends. The war made him weirdly possessive.

“The novelty of exploring it will wear off,” Draco tells him in daylight, early, pulling Harry to him in a hug where they’re surrounded by yellow and cream. “If you repress your emotions, they come out in strange ways. You are, I hope you realise, horrendously repressed.” He says this solidly, as though waiting for it to go in. “Loo agrees with me on this entirely,” he keeps talking.

“You’re such a dick,” Harry interrupts, turning in his arms to meet his eyes and grinning teeth. “No presents for you.”

“Oh no!” Draco laments wildly, wide-eyed, and sweetly, Harry finds, they kiss.

“They’ve always been the only ones who I’ve felt sure would always love me,” Harry tries to explain his feelings.

With a deep sigh, Draco settles onto his back and immediately starts talking nonsense, sarcastic at the ceiling, one arm behind his head. The other’s squeezing Harry to a sprawl across him, scratching up his hair as though he’s a pet.

He doesn’t make any promises about loving Harry forever, and maybe this is what Harry was fishing for; he feels guilty, swallowing. He’s forgotten about Teddy, he thinks. His other children. Molly and Arthur and all the other Weasleys. So many people he knows. Kreacher and Mopsy, whose nature will always be to love. Ginny, whom he never wants to replace. All the witches who used to send him knickers through the post.

He feels guilt, but guilt is a self-indulgent emotion, as Teddy would say. Really, he thinks, he needs to stop telling himself these things about Ron and Hermione. He needs to refuse the implication for everybody else. He needs to start making absolute choices, the way that he expects the trainees at work to make them. He needs to take command of himself – and in other ways he needs to submit.

“I don’t know if other people’s love exists,” Harry says, not sure if he’s talking shit. His mother died for him, once.

Draco looks at him, allowing his stream of consciousness to trail off.

His embrace is solid, strong and warm and his arm has an ugly tattoo on the inside, but Harry can’t feel it, frowning at the bob in his throat. “I can only feel my own and experience other people’s actions. The looks on their faces – but there I just see what I want. I guard my feelings jealously and then I spend them recklessly; I’m in control of it and I pretend that I’m not.” He frowns, tucked into Draco’s chest with fingers scratching at his hair. “Really, the whole idea puts me in a panic. My pet owl at age eleven was the first thing I ever loved, and I was convinced that she loved me, but she was owl, so what the fuck was that?”

Draco laughs incredulously, a glorious titter high in his nose. He doesn’t interrupt.

Frowning harder, Harry traces Draco’s scar of the M25 under his fingers, a wobbly spider-legged loop. It’s beautiful because it’s his, and his own scars are only what make him. He thinks of Draco’s iPhone, what it will have taken to create it and then for it to end up in his hand. “I think that we have more control over this world than we like to pretend,” Harry reflects, glancing up and finding himself drawn in for a kiss, Draco’s nose nudging into his. “I think that we have less. And I think that I fucked up my marriage,” he concludes.

“Yes,” agrees Draco. His expression is comically sad for a moment, but his eyes are too sharp and they glint. “But at least I get to fuck you in the chaos of the fallout.”

“Yeah,” agrees Harry, snuggling down for a snooze. “And who’d have guessed that?”

“I’m really not allowed to say.”


	10. May, June

The Gryffindor-Slytherin, Slytherin-Gryffindor quidditch match takes place on a blustery Saturday towards the end of May. The parents’ stand remains expansive, rows separated with different families sitting seats apart. The Gryffindor and Slytherin parents are sitting as far apart as the stand will allow. This feels familiar: it’s difficult to remember a time before social distancing laws – when the thought of such a rule was dystopian – and space has always been a luxury. Harry’s never had much to say to the other Slytherin dads, and they’ve never mingled at the pub with the Gryffindors. A few couples are still wearing masks, in the summer of 2021, and by this point Harry expects they always will. 

The Gryffindor dads don’t seem to care that Harry’s come here with Draco, even if this is the first game Harry’s seen them at this year. He’ll be going to the pub with them after the match while Draco will be going with the Slytherins, so he’ll find out if any of them are willing to comment then. After Slytherin games in future he and Draco will sit apart in the pub, because according to Draco this is how the etiquette translates.

Harry wasn’t sure why either of them should go. “The whole thing is a pointless relic of nonsense,” he told Draco that morning.

“We do not attend as ourselves, Harry,” Draco told him, pulling his dark green jumper over his head, sleeves scuffed up so the snake was visible on his arm. “We attend as delegates for our children, to gather intelligence.”

“Oh,” Harry said, buttoning his shirt, trying to imagine how Albus would find out if he ever stopped going. He imagined telling Albus that he’d stopped going, and how it would make him red in the face and unhappy, a flush of empathetic shame kicking through him. “In Gryffindor we just natter,” he covered quickly.

“And I’m sure that this is true,” Draco replied insincerely, now tipping his head to look at Harry in his old-man checked shirt and sludge-coloured trousers as though he was a picture. “It is torturous,” he agreed, glancing to meet Harry’s eyes, his own glinting wickedly. “But I would say that the investment has net a return.”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” Harry told him, to feel himself blushing.

Arriving later than planned in Hogsmeade, they find Ginny and Neville at the front of the parents’ stand. Draco has his Slytherin scarf while Harry is wearing his old Hufflepuff scarf with his Barbour, to be neutral. He’s also wearing his original, olive-green tweed cap, which may or may not spend the full match on his head. Ginny’s wearing her quidditch-ball earrings and has come scarf-free, for spring. Neville will always support Gryffindor as Head of Gryffindor House, and his scarf is as old as Harry’s.

“You’re looking really well, Neville,” Harry manages to say, because it’s true. He even manages to meet Neville’s kind eyes, which is something he’s not done for over a year.

“There’s life in me yet,” Neville agrees, glancing over Harry’s shoulder and offering an olive branch. “Though does anyone look as good as this one? Malfoy, you bastard, what do you do?”

“Bathe in the blood of my enemies,” is Draco’s drawled reply, because he’s comfortable playing this role.

Harry sighs. Ginny, as though taken by surprise, titters an oddly joyful laugh.

It’s a cup final, inevitably, and the scores have been close: Gryffindor needs to win by twenty points to take the cup; Slytherin only needs to win. All Harry wants is for Lily and Albus to both have a good game.

Twenty minutes in, it’s clear that the match is going to be painful like knives, until it’s over. Albus and Lily are out of the action, marking each other high above the hoop-line – while below them, Gryffindor keeps scoring, and the Slytherin chasers are getting increasingly frustrated, their aim veering off.

Cassie Wood from sixth year, it turns out, is a phenomenal quidditch player. She’s keeper for Gryffindor, like her dad, as well as captain. Harry either didn’t know or has forgotten this, and he can only think that Partridge, Gryffindor’s usual seeker, must be terrible, that he should be sacked for his NEWTs so Harry’s Lily can play. Because there’s no way that the lions should be twenty points away from the cup with a keeper this good, for fuck’s sake.

Sitting on Harry’s right, Draco is stoic but bristling, as Scorpius is thwarted again.

The buzz in the parents’ stand has mostly died down, because the score now sits at one-hundred to ten. One-sided matches are no fun for anyone.

In the row behind them, however, a metre away, Oliver the proud dad of course is still shouting, “Yes!” every time that his daughter blocks a goal. “Get it, Cassie!”

Draco takes out his phone, and Harry thinks that he’s bored, sighing deeply, but instead of browsing whatever he browses, he texts a two-word text and presses Send. There’s an audible ping from behind them, and he puts the phone away.

“What’s that?” Mrs Wood is asking.

“Kazamagram,” says Oliver, distracted. “I thought that I’d turned off notifications…”

The next time he tries to cheer, he starts hiccoughing. It doesn’t stop.

Harry turns to his right, away from the game, shoving Draco’s arm and never surprised by what magic can achieve. “What’ve you done?” he mutters. “Cast the counter.”

“No,” Draco tells him, looking pleased, jiggling his leg as Harry jabs it. “It’ll wear off,” he allows. “It’s a minor hex, just for you.”

“That sort of hex is assault,” insists Harry under his breath, prodding his fingers again.

There in his dark green scarf, against all the bunting, Draco looks remarkably smug. “Arrest me,” he suggests. _You won’t get far._

There’s a rare Slytherin save, and everyone cheers. The Slytherin parents clap. Harry claps.

“It’s an abuse of your –” _Extra-legal powers,_ Harry doesn’t say, leaning close.

Draco leans closer, _You’ll have punish me, HP._

They shouldn’t do this in public, Harry thinks to himself. And he is so fucking compromised, at forty years of age.

On Harry’s other side, past Ginny, Neville has turned around in his seat, offering Oliver a brown paper bag of something like liquorice to suck on, given how he’s turned slightly pink.

Ginny is watching, biting her lip. She’s attracted to Neville acting like a schoolteacher, most likely, nowadays, but she’s not fundamentally changed. When Neville’s not looking, she leans in towards Harry and Draco and forms a conspiracy, “Did you jinx Oliver?” Her expression is sharp and alight and amused; Draco seems to be growing in her estimation by the minute. “That’s hilarious. He was driving me mental. Up the wall,” she corrects quickly – and it’s funny, but the kids don’t say it, so.

“Glad you approve,” is Draco’s reply, of course. Harry despairs.

Finally, eventually, when Gryffindor are ahead by two-hundred points, Albus catches the snitch. He’s been hunting desperately as the points have racked up against Slytherin, but Lily has blocked him, distracted him. They’ve been out of the action, but neither of them has lost focus, and anyone who seeks will know that they’ve been good. Those who don’t play rarely realise how much of the game seekers spend in a stand-off.

For the final chase they make a good show for all of the crowd, swooping low and whirling round the pitch neck-and-neck, neither succeeding in blocking the other, the sight reminding Harry of the years when it was the pair of them at home, when he would take them out. The crowd are excited – they stand up when Harry does – and everyone cheers for Albus when he’s victorious.

Clapping, Harry expects that Albus has played on the fact that he’s taller and has longer arms, like the one he’s holding straight above his head – but Lily’s nippy, and Harry hopes that they’ll have the chance for a rematch next year, when Albus will be taking his OWLs.

It’s a Pyrrhic victory over his sister, for Albus, of course, and it’s quickly forgotten as Gryffindor remembers that they came here to win. Led by lions, the crowd erupts into a second wave of hollering and Lily swoops to find her team like a dragonfly, fluttering around the triumphant Cassie Wood.

The crowd traditionally invades the pitch at this point – the end of the year’s final match – and behind Harry parents are chattering, clattering loudly as they make their way to the stairs.

Harry’s on his feet with Draco and Ginny and Neville, still clapping.

His sixth-year son is on the pitch, and Harry’s forgotten until he sees it coming – he sees James rushing up to Cassie the victorious captain and they throw their arms around each other in joy. And then Harry’s son is kissing this girl in front of the entire fucking school, despite barely ever having mentioned her.

“For fuck’s sake, James,” Ginny swears on Harry’s left. She’s turning to Neville.

“He’s in love with his mother,” Harry says before he can stop himself.

“– I keep telling you; he’s me,” Ginny’s saying. “Convinced that he’s the protagonist.”

“He is not in love with his mother,” Draco scoffs as on the pitch, James pulls back and grins. The girl at least is grinning too.

“You’ve always been the protagonist to me, Gin,” Neville’s saying down the way, the suave so-and-so.

“I thought that you’d decided to start acknowledging race,” Draco reminds Harry.

Cassie’s mother is Asian, Harry supposes he should note. She’s already gone downstairs. He’s pretty certain that her heritage is Bangladeshi. She’s not hijabi – witches rarely are, though Harry thinks that her parents might be muggles. Her name’s Nadia, he finally remembers, Nadia Wood, though he’s not sure how she spells it and he doesn’t remember her from school. They chat sometimes on the platform and he’s seen her around the Ministry building. She may have been one of the respondents to the Ministry survey who said that everything was fine apart from the odd racial slur and the disparate pay. And that time when her mate was roughed up.

He’ll have to straighten out the basic facts, Harry supposes, if James and Cassie get married three years from now. The pay gap will be why he feels guilty for taking Draco out even though he can afford it and for enjoying kedgeree, for shopping on Piccadilly and walking up the Burlington Arcade. Some of that might be fixed eventually, along with the rest of it, if the Ministry group gets the guidance right. There’ll be fits and starts of radical action, led by the kids’ generation.

At least he didn’t ask her to explain it to him, Harry supposes.

“Yeah, also, Harry,” Ginny’s interrupting Harry’s thoughts from his left, as though she’s just registered Harry’s remark and is distinctly unimpressed. “You forget that Cassie Wood is nice.”

The two teenagers were talking, but now James is leaning in again. There’s a reason why the kids think their mum is tough.

“JAMES SIRIUS, PUT THAT GIRL DOWN!” Ginny yells towards the pitch, leaning over the barrier and slapping it with her palm. “SHE’S JUST WON A CUP, FOR FUCK’S SAKE; SHE HAS MORE IMPORTANT THINGS TO DO THAN SNOG YOU!”

James is jumping, bright red, looking for the voice. Cassie and the team are all laughing; one her teammates offers a high five. Lily looks devastated, and Harry makes plans to give her a hug.

“ _MUM!_ ” James is roaring up to the stand, the word bellowing over the pitch.

“DON’T YOU FORGET HOW I CAN EMBARRASS YOU,” Ginny’s still shouting, never embarrassed in front of their children, pointing at James as the team are led away to where they should have been going before. “I’VE KNOWN YOU SINCE THE DAY YOU WERE BORN!”

Neville’s laughing, down the way. Draco’s expression is utter disbelief.

“She became a sweary Molly Weasley,” Harry explains, keeping his ear covered as Ginny shouts again, swearing. “I’m attracted to that,” he jokes.

Ginny shoves him hard. She talks past him quickly to Draco, het up, defensive, prone to taking things too far, and Harry regrets what he’s said. “Harry has a weird kink about Ron and Hermione taking him to bed with them,” she tells Draco – and Neville too, who chokes, thank you, Ginny. “He thinks that they don’t know.”

They don’t, Harry’s certain. Before Draco can answer and Harry can get himself in a panic, he finds himself saying quickly, “Nah.” He stays Draco with a hand on his arm. He doesn’t want this to become a competition. He makes a joke. “The idea’s now that we have them round to ours and Draco fucks them while I watch from the door.”

It _is_ ridiculous, when he says it out loud. Harry finds himself huffing a snort. He’s tingling with terror.

Looking at him, Ginny’s eyes burn bright. Her sense of humour’s always been sharper-edged than Harry’s and she wants to laugh now; it’s all suppressed. He remembers how for ten years they were everything to each other, and then for another ten they both remained faithful. “You’d never go through with that,” she insists, because she knows him very well and, actually, she isn’t always trying to win.

“I could,” protests Harry, raising his chin, trying to say thanks and apologise. “I’m trying new things these days.”

Ginny laughs, and it’s like the sun bursts from clouds across her face.

From Harry’s other side, Draco drawls, “He’s also taken.” He wraps a possessive arm around Harry’s back and Harry lets him, quirking a quick grin to greet his eyes and glance up at the hat which has found its way onto his head.

Tutting, Ginny’s just warming up. “No, not until you piss on him,” she insists, and with a huff she makes Draco laugh.

On her other side, weakly, Neville tries, “They’re lifting the cup…”

But Ginny and Harry both listen when it’s Neville, so they join in the cheer and dutifully clap. Lily looks up and she sees them, grinning brightly, and Harry finds himself grinning, because his daughter’s just helped her team win a cup.

“Your side always wins,” complains Draco, squeezing Harry close instead of clapping too.

* * *

By June, Harry has lost all interest in fantasising with Draco about Ron and Hermione. He shuts the door with a gentle _click_.

“We’ll have to discover next year whether these crises are annual,” is all Draco says while reading the paper, not wearing any clothes, and there’s been one night in the past two weeks when they’ve fallen asleep without having sex.

For Draco’s birthday, the fifth of June, which is a Saturday, Harry decides that they should visit a Pick Your Own strawberry farm. Draco doesn’t want a party and doesn’t want to be treated, but Harry’s ended up buying him a watch. The only watch Draco owns is the one his parents gave him at seventeen and he doesn’t wear it; he checks the time on his phone.

“Senior professionals wear watches, Draco,” Harry points out, putting it on him and fussing. It looks good.

Draco looks at him, and Harry thinks that he’s saying thank you for his present. “Or is it that parents buy watches for their kids?” Harry and Ginny bought one together for James back in May, as Harry should have remembered that they would.

“Stop trying to make it weird that I love you,” is what Harry tells Draco, tutting and kissing him quickly.

The trip to the strawberry farm is a reward for Harry, really, following the long chat he has with James on their mirror about using protection and the fact that there are many ways to say _I love you_ which do not involve proposing marriage.

“So I should buy her expensive presents,” James suggests, too insightful for his own good. His expression is wry and he’s smirking. “Or put her up in our house.”

“I’m just saying that there’s time,” Harry insists, refusing to admit fault on the presents. He stuck to his budget, mostly, for Lily and Albus. “You’ve both still got a year of Hogwarts, for a start.”

“Dad, get a grip,” James tells him, and it’s worse. He has the look in his eyes which reveals what he’s thinking about, slouched against a desk in an empty classroom somewhere. “I’m not proposing to Cassie, for fuck’s sake. I’ve just always thought that she’s fit.”

 _Always_ for James likely means around three years. “ _Always_ is a very long time,” Harry tries to explain. He expects a better lesson will be that he and Ginny are getting divorced.

“Can she stay with us over the summer?” James asks, as if there’s a world in which Harry might say yes.

“James, your girlfriend is not staying with us.” James and Cassie are both seventeen. “You can apparate and go for ice cream on the beach.”

Picking strawberries at a Pick Your Own farm is something that Harry used to do with the children, when they were young. It’s a nostalgic pleasure, he thinks, to take the train out of the city to a quiet little village, tromp out to the fields with empty bags, get given the baskets, get started.

There’s tighter management these days at the farm, and they’re assigned a particular row – but the basics are still what they were and Harry’s dressed for the weekend; the man in the car park gives his outfit a nod.

Draco is wearing his wellies, at least. In the summer, also, it seems that his knitted jumpers transform into white shirts with rolled sleeves just like Harry’s – a little crisper – and the faded Dark Mark is cleanly on show in the sun.

“Unpaid labour is not relaxing,” he’s saying, complaining more professionally than any of the children ever did, ambling and getting in Harry’s way and eating more than he picks, which isn’t allowed. They’ve both been having an awful weeks at work. Draco has a new set of gashed scars high on his right arm, hidden for now under his sleeve. They clearly hurt him, but Harry’s not asked where they’ve come from. 

“It’s not unpaid labour,” Harry tuts, picking, quite certain that it’s a kink to indulge him rather than any attempt to fulfil his emotional needs. Even if it is his birthday. “It’s paid in strawberries. They’re cheap. Who’re you texting?”

Draco’s texting.

“Your ex-wife,” he says, not looking up. “That’s what I do now, when you say something ridiculous.”

In response to this obvious lie, Harry takes off his cap, climbs to his feet and scoops it solidly onto Draco’s head. There are ever glimpses of scalp through the blond, which Harry fears will always look sad and in need of a hug. It’s June now and already quite warm; he needs to find an embarrassing straw hat.

Receiving the tweed cap for now, Draco sighs, a little pink in his cheeks. He puts away his phone.

Teddy and Petra have come with them today. They’re in the row of strawberries next to theirs, competing to fill their baskets the quickest, not seriously. Petra seems to be enjoying herself, which Harry’s relieved to see. She went to her nice school and is as articulate as Teddy, but otherwise she’s clearly on her best behaviour, just as Harry’s trying to be, too. She’s muggle and she’s black, her heritage maybe African-Caribbean, but this is just Harry’s default assumption. Her parents are divorced.

Hermione’s mother is Senegalese and her unmarried name was Faye, like the footballer, which is a reference Hermione likes giving witches and wizards when they ask. Harry’s certain that Teddy’s colleagues assume that Petra’s a witch, because her surname is Thompson, and Petra Thompson sounds like a witch’s name. Also, she’s with Teddy, who must get mocked for going out with someone who has the same surname as his old head of house. Harry recognises her, he thinks, from the group of Hufflepuffs – and apparently their muggle friends – who went on the BLM marches last summer, and Harry likes the idea that she and Teddy met there unexpectedly. He also likes that they’re here.

“Your gay goddad’s hilarious,” Harry overhears her telling Teddy, also. “I get exactly what you mean. He’s Pikachu and you’re Ash. Maybe Misty.”

“I’m Professor Oak,” Teddy protests. “I’m chill. And he’s not gay; he’s bisexual –”

“Bisexuals can call themselves gay; how does he self-define –?”

 _Maybe they’ll be together forever,_ Harry thinks, getting ahead of himself.

As usual, eventually, Harry finds himself lost to tunnel vision, and he picks more strawberries than a family of six could eat in a week, though they always used to get through them, before.

“I’m glad that I didn’t over-exert myself,” Draco drawls, when they’ve paid and packed up the punnets. “I’ll need my energy to hoof these to London.”

Harry gives him a look, because he’s acting up for Petra, who’s suppressing a laugh. Harry’s already cast a charm on the bags, which only contain a few measly kilos in any case.

The look Draco returns suggests that he won’t be happy until Harry carries him home in a sedan. He hates wearing a mask on the train. It’s very different from being with Ginny.

“You could have a party,” Petra suggests, and Harry likes her a lot. “On Primrose Hill. You’ll need a lot of cream.” She and Teddy have each bought a tub in the shop. They’ll eat their strawberries in the garden, today, or in the conservatory if it gets cold. Teddy’s quote-unquote _booked the space._

“Yeah, we could do that,” Harry agrees, even as another idea enters his head.

“Oh no,” Teddy says, because he sees exactly what it is. “Cousin Draco; it’s the look.”

“ _Cousin Draco?_ ” Petra’s laughing, and Harry’s decided; she’s the best. Teddy’s been dropping the _Cousin_ , till now, but he’s been picking strawberries; he’s relaxed. “Teddy,” she says smartly, “you’re so posh.”

* * *

It doesn’t take long for Harry to gather the jars and set them to sterilise. He’s been stockpiling for months, and according to his book he has enough. He’s going to have to raid Sainsbury’s for sugar, but he thinks that there’ll be stock. He’s been on many raids in his time.

“Petra, this is my greenhouse,” Harry shows her first, giving the tour. He doesn’t invite her inside the greenhouse, because that’s spelled to be four times bigger than it looks. Teddy’s application to tell Petra about magic is still working its way through the Ministry, but they’re planning to move in together and allowance is given to cohabiting unmarried couples, these days.

“It’s lovely,” Petra says, peering inside the wonky greenhouse. “Are those orange trees? Amazing.” The trees are in flower; Kreacher does more work than he should, looking after them. Harry uses spells; it’s still not clear if there’ll be fruit. “You could make whisky marmalade. Or marmalade gin.”

“I like her,” Harry tells Teddy as he snorts, all piercings and blue. “Why haven’t you brought her round before?”

“Dad chose most of the colours in this house,” Teddy tells Petra as they carry on the tour, back inside the conservatory. “Aunt Ginny’s taste is refined.”

“Says you,” Harry retorts, because Teddy’s wearing at least six clashing colours for his date, his eyes startling against his hair.

Petra’s laughing, as though she’s certain that they’re exactly alike.

“I’m getting sugar from the shop,” Harry tells Draco after this, once the jars are in the oven and Teddy’s showing Petra upstairs. “D’you want anything?”

“No,” Draco tells him, sitting with a beer in the teal basement kitchen. He glances up from his phone, blinking, his mouth twitching when he meets Harry’s eyes. A light turns on and he’s himself again, or not. “Actually, if you’re going, we could use a few things –” He makes up a list, and Harry’s not sure they need any of it.

He enjoys buying it anyway.

“Did you get me a cake?” is what he’s asked when he gets back, by hopeful grey eyes.

It’s ridiculous, that Harry feels guilt. He’s convinced that Draco exploits it. It may be intended to teach him a lesson. “Cake was not on the list,” is what he says, because it wasn’t. He rummages through the canvas bags, dumped on the table. One of them is from Flourish & Blotts and likely shouldn’t have been used. “I’ve got croissants,” he suggests, fishing out the box.

Croissants weren’t on the list either, but Harry thought that they might be nice to have in the morning.

Draco’s phone pings; it’s not Scorpius.

“I’ve got crisps,” Harry says, continuing the hunt. Draco loves crisps.

Frowning, Draco’s reading the text, holding out a grabbing hand.

Harry feels a short rush of happiness when Draco takes the bag of crisps, which opens on its own, as if by magic, so that he can set it on the table and plunge a hand inside, crunch and read. He fears that he looks happy and spiky and covered in lightning bolts, exactly like a fucking pikachu, no matter that his hair’s half grey and short.

The hulling takes longer, later, when the jars are out of the oven and the shopping’s put away. Draco’s eating crisps and texting. Kreacher, at least, is impressed by Harry’s haul of strawberries, but Harry refuses to let him help with something so repetitive and fiddly. “For fuck’s sake, Kreacher; think about your arthritis.”

This sends him off in a huff.

“There’ll be a charm,” Draco tells Harry, watching, not helping, eating the product and mixing in the odd few crumbs. He sets his phone face-down on the table.

“And that’s why we used to use a charm for ingredients in Potions,” says Harry, hulling.

“ _Sir!_ ” Draco complains to the air, trying to sound young, mostly sounding camp, there in his white shirt with his tattoo, stealing a strawberry before he eats it to the stalk, sucking obscenely. “ _Potter’s mutilating my strawberries, sir,_ ” he says, and Harry can’t remember what year this was in.

“Here,” Harry says, shoving a bowl of washed strawberries over the table. An empty bowl. A spare knife. “You were always good at this stuff.”

He still is, it turns out. He stops complaining, once he gets going.

They hull.

“Did you ever do this with Ginny?” Draco asks, once he’s finished his bowl and is moving to the next. He’s going quicker than Harry, much too good with a knife. He can be vulnerable, if he’s given time and space; he sounds vulnerable now.

“No,” Harry tells him, not sure why he’s asking. He and Ginny are getting divorced. “I like to think that I could’ve done, but I never did. I’ve never done this before,” he explains. “I’ve never had a home with homemade jam in it. Molly’s always made it.”

Later, Harry’s cooking, and Draco’s looking at his phone.

“Mm,” Draco makes a noise, scrolling. “There’s another local lockdown,” he says, and apparently it’s not all work and Scorpius. Sometimes he’s reading BBC News.

“Where’s that?” Harry asks, stirring his wooden spatula and moving to do a test on a plate.

“Leicester again,” is Draco’s reply. “Do we know anyone in Leicester?”

“Don’t think so,” Harry tells him, turning off the heat and tilting the saucepan to pour.

“You wouldn’t fucking know anyway.” Draco’s saved some strawberries for eating, because he’s finished his crisps.

“I expect that’s true,” Harry accepts, saucepan back on the stove before he sets the circle of paper and screws the lid on his first hot jar, a glove on his left hand. He starts on the others, some of his circles not quite exactly perfect.

They’re in the kitchen and the back door is open, leading up the stairs to the garden. The breeze is fresh and cool, and it will feel like summer soon. Teddy’s outside, out of sight – but every now and then Harry’s been hearing his laugh. Another laugh, which chimes with his.

Right now, Harry thinks that his eldest child might well be snogging his girlfriend in the garden, because it’s gone quiet. He’s tightening lids on jars and can hear the dull squeak of the glass. Petra will be staying overnight, because she and Teddy are both twenty-three, not seventeen, and Harry was married by the age of twenty-three. It’s an arbitrary rule.

With a sigh, Draco clonks his phone face-down on the table, again. He looks up, telling Harry, “I’m convinced that we’ll never get back to normal.”

It’s been a year since Harry opened a door in his head, and at this point he’s long walked through. The other side is only the other side of the wall and the world remains much as it was – but it’s different. He’s in a different room and there are different things here; different parts of himself. He doesn’t know if they’re better, but there’s a fresh breeze.

Draco’s untangling parchment labels and setting them neatly before him on the table, because he’s helping – just. With a quill he starts writing each label swiftly, immaculately, the letters angular with serifs at their edges, the ink dark blue.

 _Strawberry,_ he’s writing. _2021_

He’s going to take a picture with his phone and send it to Scorpius, Harry imagines. The Potterpinfoys group still exists. Harry might send a picture too.

“I don’t want to get back to normal,” Harry says. And it’s almost too simple to say, but Harry says it, when Draco looks up, looking vulnerable. He doesn’t feel broken by nostalgia; he feels like he’s making jam, and they’ll have it with the Sainsbury’s croissants in the morning. On Monday he’ll put on his robes and his boots and go into the Ministry, unless he’s called in before that, and his boots are sitting by the front door with his wellies. Until then he promises, because this is something he can, and maybe it will be true forever, “I like this.”

.


End file.
